I Am Not Your Muslim : NPR

2017/05/08 Leave a comment

Valid points on pigeon-holing identities by Nesrine Malik:

But recent still-in-flux Muslim populations are being forced into an identity matrix that ends up serving the ultimate purpose of setting apart and alienating people in their own homes. Oxford-based freelance journalist Shaista Aziz said, “Younger Muslim women have said to me they feel under pressure to appear in an over styled, hypersexualized way in order to fit in — to wear flawless make up, a certain style of clothing and a certain style of hijab.” She said visibility for Muslim women is increasingly based on appearance. “The images are narrow and manipulated by a dominant media and commercial narrative. Muslim women who are given space to be visible in public spaces almost always have to be in hijabs? Why? All of this is dangerous and counterproductive.”

Today, Muslims are subjected to whatever the Muslim equivalent of “mansplaining” is. Non-Muslims tell us, with great certainty and in great detail, what Muslims are; or Muslims ventriloquizing on behalf of non-Muslims do the same, but not in a way that makes them consciously complicit.

Take the Khans of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for example. They are liberal America’s final answer to the right’s toxic messaging and Trump’s “Muslim ban” electioneering. Rather than countering simplistic and reductionist views of Muslims, they confirmed them — something that was not lost on many, despite how desperate the situation was. At the time, The New York Times reported that:

“The manner in which Mr. Khan was lionized in the American media also aroused discomfort and debate among other American Muslims. Some say it has resurrected the specter of the ‘good Muslim’ — the idea, born of the febrile post-2001 era, that Muslim-American patriotism can be measured only by the yardstick of terrorism and foreign policy. That raised a question: Did Mr. Khan’s testimony, determined and powerful as it was, show that it takes the death of a son, in a disputed war in a Muslim land, to prove you are a good American?”

As happened with the Khans, the identity matrix is a trap that presents itself as the answer to broad-brush generalizations about Muslims as terrorists or radicals, but actually ends up being similarly simplistic.

A whole cottage industry has taken root, one that presents different Muslim products, sometimes literally in a matrix. A popular video of different Muslims saying “I’m Muslim but I’m not [insert generically Muslim quality]” is a good example of this genre of well-intentioned efforts that legitimize all the questions hanging over Muslims. Hijabi women rap and pose on the cover of Playboy. Muslim reformers in hipster beards and skinny jeans are featured in magazines, reducing “empowerment” to lifestyle and perpetuating the trope of the good Muslim — a relatable, relatively affluent creature whose identity enables a non-Muslim to neatly annotate and categorize in a manner that does not challenge any latent prejudices or preconceptions.

Everyone else gets to be treated as an individual, complex and irreducible, while Muslims get treated as Muslims. The Muslim identity matrix is not to be conflated with a pride in identity. That is more of an effortless expression, un-demanded.

Hijabi women for example, get most of the high profile exposure even though they are a minority within a minority. There are more Muslim women in hijab fronting social activism campaigns than there are that do not wear the headscarf. These are attractive strong women who are leaders in their fields, but part of their elevation is due to them making a more powerful point in their hijab, because it is the symbol most associated with Muslim subjugation of women.

Teen Vogue recently picked up a Webby award for a series “demolishing misconceptions about Muslim women.” Most of these women were in hijab, with a very distinct style image. Teen Vogue is indeed characterized by an aspirational lifestyle element, but it is part of a wider phenomenon and a continuation of the good Muslim trope. Those that adhere to the trend assume that an explanation of a certain point on the identity matrix where visibility and privilege intersect means that the entire scale of Muslim experience has been humanized.

However, to frame everything in terms of refutation is the opposite of empowerment.

Muslims genuinely trying to push back against negative stereotypes is no longer just a matter of representation, but survival. Liberal politicians and media are also keen to oppose right-wing views of Muslims, and the consumerist market in general sees Muslims as a new iteration of “behind the veil” tropes or Westernized “bad asses” (see Nike’s recent commercial starring Muslim women defying disapprovers as they sport their way to freedom). The commodification of Muslim identity is emerging as the most powerful influence in the process of identity formation. The interaction between the free market and the very narrow prism through which dominant establishment thinking is filtered has begun to treat Muslims like any other product.

This is not to suggest that Muslims have some innate authenticity that should transcend the inevitable and highly competitive market of merchandise whose subjects have very little say in what is amplified and what is not, but some refuse to resign themselves to it. The grotesque prejudice and violence against Muslims has created a counter push where only positive, stylized, aspirational, attractive, overly feminized, bourgeoisie Islam has flooded the zone. It is at once too much and not enough. An exercise in erasure.

If there were a James Baldwin of the Muslim diaspora, his rebuke to this race to the bottom would be “I am not your Muslim.”

Source: I Am Not Your Muslim : Code Switch : NPR

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Universities need diversity plans or will lose research money, says council

2017/05/08 Leave a comment

Yet another illustration of how the government’s diversity and inclusion agenda is being implemented (gap is with respect to women, Indigenous peoples, and persons with disabilities, not with respect to visible minorities):

Universities have less than two years to find ways to recruit more women and minorities for Canada Research Chairs, or they won’t get any more positions funded by the federal government.

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, which reviews and approves applications from universities for Canada Research Chair positions, issued that edict this week.

“We’ve been talking about this for some time, we’ve been monitoring progress to meet the targets,” said council president Ted Hewitt.

The move comes a week after Science Minister Kirsty Duncan told The Canadian Press that she was dismayed universities had not improved the rate at which they recruited women for the lucrative research jobs and was prepared to force their hand.

Hewitt said the change was in the works before Duncan’s remarks.

The council reviews the program every five years and last summer, when the preliminary results of a 15-year review came out, existing efforts to get more women, minorities, people with disabilities and indigenous people appointed to research chairs did not appear to be working.

“We said ‘OK, that’s it’ we have to think about what we can do here to speed up progress,” said Hewitt. “That was a very serious catalyst for us.”

Universities with at least five of the research positions will be required to submit an equity plan by Dec. 15 showing how they intend to meet the equity targets laid out by the granting council. They have until December 2019 to recruit and appoint enough researchers to meet their targets.

If their appointment applications do not match their equity targets by then, the council will withhold funding for new positions until they do.

Hewitt said universities submit twice as many male applicants as female applicants, so the council wants to find a way to force them to seek out more diverse applicants.

“At this pace, they’re never going to meet their targets,” he said.

Canada Research Chairs run for five or seven years and bring $100,000 or $200,000 in annual funding, depending on whether it’s a more experienced tier one position, or an emerging researcher, tier two position.

Universities cannot terminate positions early to open up spaces for more diverse applicants, which is why the council is giving them a deadline more than 18 months away.

The program provides $265 million a year to pay for up to 2,000 research positions in engineering, natural sciences, health sciences, humanities and social sciences.

As of this month, there are 1,615 positions filled, of which 30 per cent are held by women. Women account for just 17 per cent of the more lucrative tier one jobs and 37 per cent of the tier two jobs.

The program also wants to increase the presence of people with disabilities, visible minorities and indigenous people. In the 2015 to 2017 period, 15 per cent of researchers were from visible minorities, which met the target set by the council. However only one per cent of positions were filled by a researcher who had a disability, below the four per cent target. The universities had granted positions to about 16 indigenous researchers, which met the one per cent target.

Source: Universities need diversity plans or will lose research money, says council – Macleans.ca

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Film And Food: Sharing The Stories Of Immigrants With Conservative America : NPR

2017/05/06 Leave a comment

I am a great fan of food and festivals to bring people together.

This project is particularly innovative in the way it tries to get outside the bubble and engage those with concerns or fears:

Like a lot of creatives distressed by the current political climate, filmmakers Daniel Klein and Mirra Fine want to tell stories that matter right now. They want to make a difference.

The husband-and-wife duo behind the Perennial Plate, a weekly web-based program showcasing sustainable food and farming practices, believe in the power of a meal combined with storytelling to bring people together.

Now, Perennial Plate wants to use its platform to spark a dialogue, particularly with conservative Americans, about immigrants and refugees in this country. Klein and Fine want to sow seeds for tolerance and acceptance — in contrast to fear and distrust. And they’re starting with five short films under the banner “Resistance Through Storytelling” about multi-generational immigrant families making a meal and gathering at the dinner table.

YouTube

“Food is as good a place as any to start a conversation. Food and family are the great connectors, something we all have in common,” Klein says. Each film will feature a compelling family who originally hailed from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America or the Middle East.

Klein and Fine have spent almost 10 years telling 160 such tales. They started locally, documenting the foodways of Minnesota, their home state. Then they set off around the country, before eventually circling the globe gathering footage and stitching together intimate portraits of the different ways people farm and cook. For example, the episode Our Heart Within Us recounts the story of Francisco and Lucia, Mayan refugees from Guatemala who came to Alamosa, Colo., in the 1980s. The couple grow plants indigenous to their country of origin in their adopted community; by doing so, they’ve held on to a piece of their homeland.

En route, the husband-and-wife team earned two James Beard Awards (they’re like the Oscars of the food world) and added another partner, fellow filmmaker Hunter Johnson, to the mix.

In an intriguing distribution approach, the filmmakers plan to use Facebook advertising, known as sponsored posts, to reach a wider audience and a different demographic than they have to date. They intend to target Americans whose social media preferences suggest they might not be sympathetic to the plight of newcomers to the United States. Sponsored posts can roll out in feeds in specific locations (such as swing states like Wisconsin) and cherry-pick people with particular interests (say John McCain and The Packers).

“We want to get outside of our liberal bubble,” says Klein. “We’re not interested in preaching to the choir.”

The unorthodox distribution model makes sense. These days, many Americans rely on Facebook as a source of news. And the newsfeed on anyone’s social network can create what Klein calls an echo chamber, where a user only sees posts from like-minded people and sources.

The best illustration of this stark division in the dissemination of political information: Perhaps The Wall Street Journal‘s “Blue Feed, Red Feed,”which includes an immigration category. Launched in May 2016, the tool is updated hourly. Even a cursory scroll through the side-by-side feeds reveal there’s nothing fake about the deep divide in news consumed in this country.

A woman in China’s Yunnan Province makes tofu in an episode of Perennial Plate called “Where The Water Settles.”

Courtesy of Perennial Plate

“My perspective on immigrants and refugees is entirely positive and based on personal experience,” says Klein.

But some of his family members and friends, who see posts in their newsfeeds from right-wing pundits and their ilk, are nervous and worried about immigrants and refugees, he says. Some of them don’t know any actual recent immigrants, which only adds to the disconnection.

“This doesn’t make them ‘bad,’ ” he says, “but I do think it’s time to get more positive stories of immigrants and refugees in front of audiences that don’t normally see that narrative.”

Daniel Klein picks meat from crabs with the young daughter of a former strawberry picker in Oxnard, Calif., for an episode called “A Day In The Life.”

Courtesy of Perennial Plate

It is widely documented, says Klein, that when a person knows someone of a different background or ethnicity, his or her perspective on that “group” changes. He points to a recent anecdotal story about a member of a mostly white, President Trump-supporting southern Illinois county who was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Its residents and elected officials rallied around Juan Carlos Hernandez Pacheco, a father, restaurant manager and longtime pillar of the community, who also happens to be an undocumented immigrant. Locals didn’t seem to care. They just wanted Carlos back home — in West Frankfort, Ill., that is, according to a New York Times account. He was released from immigration detention in March.

Source: Film And Food: Sharing The Stories Of Immigrants With Conservative America : The Salt : NPR

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Le PQ, la diversité et le nationalisme civique

2017/05/06 Leave a comment

Good overview by Robert Dutrisac of the ongoing challenge facing the PQ (and fussing on words doesn’t solve their existential question of who is “nous”):

On connaît la suite : Pauline Marois a amorcé un virage identitaire qui culminait dans la maladroite charte sur les valeurs dites « québécoises » — des valeurs, en réalité, occidentales, voire universelles. Le PQ réaffirmait tout de même le caractère pluraliste de la nation québécoise.

Avec cette concordance culturelle, Jean-François Lisée délaisse l’interculturalisme cher à Gérard Bouchard. Il juge que la notion officielle de l’interculturalisme, telle que définie par le gouvernement libéral, est trop molle puisqu’elle ne fait pas référence à un tronc commun bâti au Québec au fil de l’histoire. Pour certains d’ailleurs, dont Charles Taylor et Daniel Marc Weinstock, l’interculturalisme n’est qu’une version du multiculturalisme canadien.

Ce concept ressemble beaucoup à la « convergence culturelle » de Fernand Dumont qu’a reprise le PQ de René Lévesque en 1981. Cette politique, intitulée « Autant de façons d’être Québécois », avait pour objectif de rassembler les cultures ethniques sous l’égide de la majorité, ce qui peut se résumer par leur assimilation.

Selon Jean-François Lisée, la concordance culturelle n’a pas de visées assimilatrices, mais préconise plutôt « la formation d’une collectivité inclusive » dans laquelle « chaque citoyen et chaque génération effectue son parcours identitaire comme il ou elle l’entend ». Mais les Québécois de toutes origines sont appelés à partager « une différence vitale » caractérisée par la langue française et un récit historique singulier. À cela s’ajoutent des éléments civiques comme l’égalité entre les hommes et les femmes, la démocratie, la solidarité et un « cheminement vers un État laïque ».

Ce concept de concordance sera difficile à expliciter en campagne électorale ; il est heureusement associé à des mesures concrètes pour favoriser la réussite des immigrants en luttant, notamment, contre la discrimination à l’embauche et le racisme.

Ce n’est pas d’hier que le PQ a des relations ardues avec les communautés culturelles. Lors de la campagne référendaire de 1980, René Lévesque avait vexé des Italo-Québécois indépendantistes — c’est l’écrivain Marco Micone qui raconte l’anecdote — en déclarant : « La majorité francophone décidera elle-même de son avenir. »Évidemment, il y a eu par la suite « les votes ethniques » de Jacques Parizeau et ce « nous » qui avait voté à 60 % pour le Oui.

Le projet de nationalisme civique, qu’ont porté Gilles Duceppe au Bloc québécois et Gérald Larose, visait à éviter ces écueils. Mais le problème, c’est que le nationalisme civique au Québec ne veut pas dire grand-chose. La nation québécoise, au sein de l’ensemble canadien, n’a pas le monopole des principes démocratiques et des droits de la personne. Sans l’existence de cette majorité francophone au parcours historique singulier, le projet souverainiste perdrait toute pertinence.

Avec cette approche, le PQ a le mérite de la franchise. Pour rejoindre les communautés culturelles — et il doit s’y consacrer activement —, le mouvement souverainiste n’a d’autre choix que de se présenter tel qu’il est : un mouvement qui promeut un projet d’émancipation d’une nation pluraliste, auquel sont conviés tous les Québécois.

Source: Le PQ, la diversité et le nationalisme civique | Le Devoir

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Hate Speech And The Misnomer Of ‘The Marketplace Of Ideas’ : NPR

2017/05/05 Leave a comment

Good long read by David Shih on some of the weaknesses in the free speech arguments:

Critical race theorists Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic addressed this possibility in a 1992 Cornell Law Review article entitled “Images of the Outsider in American Law and Culture: Can Free Expression Remedy Systemic Social Ills.” They coin a term for the erroneous belief that “good” antiracist speech is the best remedy for “bad” racist speech: the “empathic fallacy.” The empathic fallacy is the conviction “that we can somehow control our consciousness despite limitations of time and positionality … and that we can enlarge our sympathies through linguistic means alone.”

In other words, the empathic fallacy leads us to believe that “good” speech begets racial justice and that we will be able to tell the difference between it and racist hate speech because we are distanced, objective arbiters…

In the meantime, racist hate speech flows unabated because of our faith in a flawed metaphor.

The marketplace is further gamed by “dog whistles” — code word replacements for overtly racist speech that still aim to stoke white resentment over the social mobility of people of color. When the sitting attorney general dismisses the ruling of a court because it resides on “an island in the Pacific,” he invents yet another way to signal which groups count in America and which ones don’t. And if a racist idea like this one ever flops in the marketplace, its author simply recalls it by saying he was joking.

Beyond the fact that there is little agreement over what is racist, the potential of speech to ennoble is undermined by the marketplace as postmodern spectacle. In a recent article, author Rich Benjamin recounts his experiences as the quasi-resident “left-wing pundit” on Fox’s now-cancelled O’Reilly Factor. Benjamin explains that he took this role for the chance of convincing just a fraction of O’Reilly’s immense audience of the worthiness of his ideas. However, he reveals just how strategic he needed to be to avoid being bullied and misrepresented by O’Reilly. “In the thin-skinned ethos of O’Reilly’s right-wing universe,” Benjamin writes, “the more you battered its poster boy with dead-on punches, the more ferocious the vitriol directed at you.” In the marketplace of cable news and social media, torrents of racist emails and tweets reward you for your bright ideas.

A quarter-century ago when Delgado and Stefancic published their theory of the empathic fallacy, they speculated that the infamous Willie Horton ad tipped a presidential election because voters could not view the ad objectively. We now know that racism was the primary motivation for voters who put Donald Trump in the White House. We know that the best ideas of Gold Star father Khizr Khan at the Democratic National Convention were no match for fearmongering rumors about refugees from Syria and immigrants from Mexico. We know that after almost 100 days of Trump’s presidency, only two percent of those who voted for him regret it. This might mean they don’t see his speech as racist or don’t care if it is.

If we argue that racist hate speech must be protected, we have to account for the empathic fallacy.

We can start by admitting that this position is based on the troubling belief that it is one’s right to be hateful — and not on the comforting belief that hate is a catalyst for racial justice in a “marketplace of ideas.” Better than ever, we know how specious that logic is. We can understand that student protesters may not, in fact, long for their First Amendment rights should the tables turn on them. Law professor Charles Lawrence has argued that civil rights activists in the sixties achieved substantive gains only when they exceeded the acceptable bounds of the First Amendment, only when they disrupted “business as usual.”

Racist hate speech has come to emblemize free speech protections because the parties it injures lack social power. Students of color are expected to endure insults to their identities at the same time that celebrities win multi-million dollar defamation settlements and media companies scrupulously guard their intellectual property against plagiarism.

The belief that more speech is the remedy for “bad” speech can be a principled stance. But for the stance to be principled, it must account for why the target of racist hate speech is less deserving of exemption than, say, the millionaire with a reputation to protect from libel, or the community flooded with sexually-explicit material, or the deep state with a dark secret. Some exemptions make good sense. But does an obscene photograph of an adult that “lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” (as defined in Miller v. California, the current law of the land regarding obscenity) really do more harm than a lecture promoting white supremacy?

American society fixates on antiracist protest when debating the First Amendment for the same reason it fixates on race when debating affirmative action: because of the perception that people of color are somehow undeserving of special privileges.

Yet it was supporting the rights of people of color that got Desiree Fairooz arrested in January for laughing during the Senate confirmation hearingof then-attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions. This week, the Department of Justice moved forward with her prosecution, along with those of two men who had mocked Sessions with fake Ku Klux Klan robes. In March, the Human Rights Council of the UN published a letter expressing alarm at the number of legislative efforts criminalizing peaceful assembly and expression in the US.

Powerful interests will find their way around the First Amendment to protect the status quo against antiracist protest. Asking student protesters to tolerate racist hate speech is to ask them to trust in free speech laws that have historically exempted the powerful and punished the vulnerable. When it comes to racism, the “marketplace of ideas” is not laissez-faire and never was.

Source: Hate Speech And The Misnomer Of ‘The Marketplace Of Ideas’ : Code Switch : NPR

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Why Pope Francis’ approach to Islam breaks the mold of Benedict and previous popes | America Magazine

2017/05/05 Leave a comment

Interesting long read by Christopher Lamb on the contrast between Pope Francis and his predecessor in their efforts to engage Islam:

The global growth of Islam and in particular the rise of Islamic extremism have forced recent popes to set out, with increasing urgency, a strategy for engaging the religion.

As Pope Francis’ brief trip to Egypt over the weekend demonstrated, the most recent pontiffs have come up with starkly different approaches—though it’s not yet clear if one is better than the other, or if either will be effective.

When Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI addressed the question of Islamic extremism he did so during a speech at a university in his Bavarian homeland where, as a priest and professor, Joseph Ratzinger had worked decades earlier.

That 2006 address in Regensburg, Germany, was a theological master class on the relationship between faith and reason. But it also angered Muslims who object to Benedict citing a 14th-century Christian emperor who claimed that the Prophet Muhammad had only brought the world things that were “evil and inhuman.”

Moreover, Benedict also delivered his message to Islam from afar.

Francis, on the other hand, has made it his business to try to build bridges with the Muslim world with the energy of a missionary.

That approach was on display during his 27-hour trip to Egypt, viewed as the leader in the majority Sunni Islamic world, and a nation that is making a serious—though controversial—effort to crack down on extremist-inspired violence.

So important to Francis, in fact, is the “personal encounter” with Muslims that the pontiff put his own safety at risk by going to Cairo, a trip that took place less than three weeks after 45 worshippers were killed in bomb attacks on two Egyptian churches.

The pope even shunned a bulletproof vehicle and when he arrived at a sports stadium for an open-air Mass he greeted the crowds from an open-topped golf buggy.

“Whereas previous popes — even in more secure places — have ridden in bulletproof vehicles, Francis showed his courage in Egypt, and his will to be close to the people, by this simple gesture,” explained Gabriel Said Reynolds, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Reynolds took part in a recent Vatican-Muslim forum at Cairo’s Al-Azhar university, a major center of Sunni-Islamic learning with global influence and expertise in interpreting the Quran. The dialogue that Reynolds is part of only restarted under Francis—who was elected in 2013—after relations had soured under Benedict.

Yet even as the current pope pushes for a personal encounter with Islam, his predecessor’s legacy of engaging Islam via a theological challenge to extremist elements among Muslims continues to hold some sway.

Indeed, just as Francis was heading to Egypt a letter appeared from the retired pope to the president of Poland in which Benedict accused “radical Islam” of creating an “explosive situation in Europe.”

Catholic defenders of Benedict’s Regensburg address insist that he correctly addressed some uncomfortable truths within Islam and they point out that the speech led 138 Islamic scholars to write to Benedict in 2007, a letter that paved the way for a new Catholic-Muslim dialogue initiative.

Yet while it was Muslims who approached Benedict a decade ago, under Francis things are the other way round.

Francis’ approach to Islam is characterized by a willingness to “cross over to the other side” — Egypt is the seventh Muslim majority country he has visited in his four years as pope. And a papal visit to Bangladesh, where almost 90 percent of the population are followers of Islam, is planned for later this year.

Francis’ approach to Islam is characterized by a willingness to “cross over to the other side”

In Egypt, this was symbolized by his embrace of Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, the grand imam of Al-Azhar mosque, following the pope’s address to their peace conference.

It was a powerful image of Muslim and Christian fraternity that had echoes of St. Francis of Assisi’s mission to Islamic leader Sultan Al-Kamil 800 years ago.

This personal approach has been bolstered by Francis’ consistent refusal to link the Islamic faith per se to terrorism, and has made the Islamic world take notice.

It also meant that when Francis issued one of his strongest and most detailed condemnations of religious violence during his Al-Azhar address, his speech was welcomed and frequently interrupted with applause.

“He knows that the only effective way for his message of peace to touch the hearts of the larger global community is to speak together with leaders of other religious communities,” Reynolds explained.

“He is counting on the prestige of Al-Azhar and its grand imam in particular, to join with him in broadcasting this message.”

Source: Why Pope Francis’ approach to Islam breaks the mold of Benedict and previous popes | America Magazine

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Des radicaux aussi chez les catholiques | Le Devoir

2017/05/05 Leave a comment

Indeed. Extremism and fundamentalism is not unique to any one religion:

« En ce qui concerne les morts, c’est 6 à 2 pour les intégristes catholiques », lance le sociologue Martin Geoffroy. C’est un drôle de décompte, convient ce professeur au cégep Édouard-Montpetit et directeur du Centre d’expertise et de formation sur les intégrismes religieux et la radicalisation (CEFIR). Mais il illustre bien que, malgré le fait que l’attentat de la mosquée de Québec a fait six morts, ceux reliés à l’islam radical jouissent encore d’une attention disproportionnée dans les médias et l’esprit des Québécois. « On n’hésite pas à associer les attentats terroristes au groupe État islamique et à l’intégrisme religieux, mais quand ça émane de notre propre culture, c’est plus difficile à reconnaître. »

Il rappelle que seulement deux attentats djihadistes, celui de Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu et celui au parlement d’Ottawa, qui ont fait en tout deux morts, ont été perpétrés chez nous. Le fameux complot des Toronto 18 planifié en 2006 a quant à lui été déjoué, et les liens de ces terroristes avec al-Qaïda ne seraient pas prouvés.

Fort de 20 ans de recherche sur l’extrême droite, son postulat se confirme. « C’est toujours plus facile de blâmer la culture de l’autre plutôt que de regarder notre propre culture. Mais l’intégrisme catholique, tout comme l’intégrisme islamique, a aussi un rôle à jouer dans le terrorisme », dit M. Geoffroy, reconnaissant qu’il y a d’autres facteurs, notamment psychologiques, pour expliquer cette violence extrême.

Dans une conférence qu’il donnera dans le cadre du colloque international du Centre de recherche Société, Droit et Religions de l’Université de Sherbrooke (SoDRUS) sur le thème « Les racines religieuses de la radicalisation : fait ou fiction » (les 4, 5 et 6 mai), il défendra la thèse voulant qu’au Québec, les deux formes les plus habituelles d’intransigeance religieuse sont l’intégrisme catholique et le fondamentalisme protestant. Mieux ancrés dans notre société, ces intégrismes bien de chez nous passent sous le radar des médias alors qu’ils vont pourtant à l’encontre des valeurs de la société moderne. « La radicalisation des jeunes et le djihadisme sont dangereux, je ne veux pas le minimiser. Mais cela étant dit, il faut se préoccuper de nos propres affaires. Et il semble plus difficile de regarder le côté sombre de la force de notre propre culture. »

Intégrisme catholique

Martin Geoffroy se heurte d’ailleurs souvent à des regards surpris lorsqu’il rappelle qu’il existe encore plusieurs sectes catholiques, antisémites, anti-islam, anti-immigration. Ses plus récentes recherches l’amènent à conclure que ces groupes sont « complotistes, à base d’intégrisme religieux ou les deux », soutient le chercheur, qui rappelle que des députés conservateurs avaient des liens avec l’Opus dei et la Fraternité sacerdotale Saint-Pie-X. Cette société controversée de prêtres catholiques traditionalistes fondée en Europe, qui a des ramifications au Québec, avait été vue comme trop d’extrême droite par l’Église, qui avait notamment excommunié son fondateur, Mgr Marcel Lefebvre, en 1988.

La fraternité Saint-Pie-X est aussi dans la mire d’Atalante, a-t-il remarqué grâce à une veille de ces groupes sur Internet et les réseaux sociaux, où des vidéos ont clairement établi ces liens. La dimension religieuse, à tout le moins sacrée, est également présente chez les Soldats d’Odin, un groupe d’extrême droite d’origine finlandaise qui a rapidement pris de l’ampleur au Canada. « Dans les groupes suprémacistes blancs, il y a une adoration des dieux vikings, car ils sont blonds, etc. Et Odin, c’est le dieu principal de la mythologie nordique », rappelle le chercheur, qui entamera sous peu une collaboration avec le sociologue français Gérald Bronner, pour comparer les initiatives contre la radicalisation.

Le colloque du SoDRUS fera la part belle aux présentations sur la radicalisation au sein d’autres groupes religieux (bouddhistes, sikhs, anabaptistes, etc.). Martin Geoffroy s’étonne que certains doutent encore du lien entre la religion et l’extrême droite. La radicalisation et les actes terroristes des djihadistes sont automatiquement associés à la religion, alors que la majorité des djihadistes ne sont pas pratiquants mais plutôt convertis « à la version intégriste de l’islam, un islam pour les nuls », dit-il, pointant la thèse du politologue français Olivier Roi sur la déculturation du religieux. « Mais quand on parle de l’extrême droite chez nous, on ne parle pas nécessairement de la religion catholique. On dit que ça n’a pas de rapport, comme si on voulait déconnecter l’extrême droite de notre culture », dit-il. Or ce n’est pas parce que les gens ne sont pas pratiquants qu’ils ne sont pas croyants, rappelle-t-il, précisant que le taux de catholiques pratiquants (15-17 %) est presque aussi élevé que pour les musulmans (20 %).

Source: Des radicaux aussi chez les catholiques | Le Devoir

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization Tagged with ,

What an all-white roster of astronaut hopefuls says about our schools: Andray Domise

2017/05/04 Leave a comment

In Domise’s efforts to make valid points regarding Black Canadians and the school system, he misses the bigger picture: no visible minority candidates made it to the final 17, even from groups that whose university graduation numbers are better than non-visible minorities.

That being said, I would hesitate to compare astronaut selection to other selection processes given the nature of the requirements.

In the earlier stages of the selection process, there were five visible minorities out of 72 according to my rough count (no Black Canadians among them):

While parents do bear responsibility in raising bright, ambitious youth, their work can easily be undone by teachers and school administrators who hang their preconceptions around those children’s shoulders. Rachel Décoste, a software engineer and public speaker, told me a story about her sister, who sought the help of a high school guidance counsellor in planning a career as a doctor. “The guidance counsellor said, ‘Your grades are not good enough for even considering medical school. You should look at becoming a personal support worker, through community college.’ ” Décoste’s parents, furious at the counsellor’s obstruction, contacted the school principal and demanded another counsellor provide the information that was asked for. Décoste’s sister is now an anaesthesiologist.

For youth of colour—especially Black and Indigenous youth who are stigmatized by tropes on their intelligence and ambition—the soft bigotry of low expectations can have devastating effects on those young minds. A similar sentiment came up when I spoke with Kike Ojo, an organizational change consultant whose work includes addressing the alarming rates at which the Children’s Aid Society takes custody of Black and Indigenous youth. We discussed the matter of TDSB streaming, and the tendency of guidance counsellors to push certain students towards applied courses, even though a transcript filled with applied courses could disqualify those students from university acceptance. “It really is no wonder that we see this outcome over and over,” Ojo says. “[Parents] actually have to be aggressively involved. We want to believe that success is directly linked to effort and merit, but where race is a factor, it can override even class differences.”

On the bright side, there are examples where institutions have not only acknowledged, but undertaken the work to resolve this problem. Shareef Jackson, a data analyst in the U.S. and founder of the MathLooksGood tutoring program, explained that where public schools fall short, some outside help may be needed. “A lot of students don’t have the motivation to enter the programs, or even stay in the programs, because it doesn’t seem like a realistic goal.”

Jackson attributes his own educational success to an organization called New Jersey SEEDS, a nonprofit which works with bright students from low-income neighbourhoods in order to provide access to private schools and colleges where their aptitudes may be better encouraged. Jackson also mentioned the importance of NASA’s strategic diversity and inclusion plan, which received widespread exposure last year with the release of the film Hidden Figures.

According to Jackson, positive representation and teaching the history of people of colour in the STEM fields can create a positive feedback loop, one where careers in science, medicine, and even space travel occurs to young people of colour as not only a daydream, but a real, possible outcome of hard work. The logic makes sense; if Mae Jemison, the first Black woman astronaut, was inspired to her field by Nichelle Nichols’s portrayal of Lt. Uhura in the original Star Trek, then who knows how many future Katherine Johnsons might be made by NASA’s joint marketing efforts with Hidden Figures?

North of the border, the message seems to be getting through at the university level. Encouraging diversity in STEM fields has recently become a higher priority for institutions like Waterloo, Ryerson, and the University of British Columbia. At the University of Toronto, where Black enrolment in the medical program has historically been thin or nonexistent, only one Black student exists among the current first year medical cohort. In response, U of T launched the Black Student Application program, which aims to promote medicine as a career option among Black students, as well as increase the pool of candidates by boosting applications. All of this is encouraging, but the difference still needs to be made within the seedlot for future prodigies: our public schools.

With the first pair of Canadian astronauts set to be announced later this year, making it the first cohort since 2009, there is much to be excited about. After Cmdr. Chris Hadfield’s stellar performance and social media popularity, sending more Canadians into space will be an awesome feat, no matter their background. And while the Canadian Space Agency continues the winnowing process, hopefully our educators and counsellors across the country will take heed to the fact that science is not only cool again—it’s in drastic need of new faces.

Time to start looking for those future astronauts in your classrooms.

Source: What an all-white roster of astronaut hopefuls says about our schools – Macleans.ca

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

The Collapse of American Identity – The New York Times

2017/05/04 Leave a comment

Good summary of the increased divide in America and the ongoing political implications:

But recent survey data provides troubling evidence that a shared sense of national identity is unraveling, with two mutually exclusive narratives emerging along party lines. At the heart of this divide are opposing reactions to changing demographics and culture. The shock waves from these transformations — harnessed effectively by Donald Trump’s campaign — are reorienting the political parties from the more familiar liberal-versus-conservative alignment to new poles of cultural pluralism and monism.

An Associated Press-NORC poll found nearly mirror-opposite partisan reactions to the question of what kind of culture is important for American identity. Sixty-six percent of Democrats, compared with only 35 percent of Republicans, said the mixing of cultures and values from around the world was extremely or very important to American identity. Similarly, 64 percent of Republicans, compared with 32 percent of Democrats, saw a culture grounded in Christian religious beliefs as extremely or very important.

These divergent orientations can also be seen in a recent poll by P.R.R.I. that explored partisan perceptions of which groups are facing discrimination in the country. Like Americans overall, large majorities of Democrats believe minority groups such as African-Americans, immigrants, Muslims and gay and transgender people face a lot of discrimination in the country. Only about one in five Democrats say that majority groups such as Christians or whites face a lot of discrimination.

Republicans, on the other hand, are much less likely than Democrats to believe any minority group faces a lot of discrimination, and they believe Christians and whites face roughly as much discrimination as immigrants, Muslims and gay and transgender people. Moreover, only 27 percent of Republicans say blacks experience a lot of discrimination, while 43 percent say whites do and 48 percent say the same of Christians.

Taken as a whole, these partisan portraits highlight contrasting responses to the country’s changing demographics and culture, especially over the past decade as the country has ceased to be a majority white Christian nation — from 54 percent in 2008 to 43 percent today. Democrats — only 29 percent of whom are white and Christian — are embracing these changes as central to their vision of an evolving American identity that is strengthened and renewed by diversity. By contrast, Republicans — nearly three-quarters of whom identify as white and Christian — see these changes eroding a core white Christian American identity and perceive themselves to be under siege as the country changes around them.

These responses are shifting the political magnetic field that defines the parties. Republican leaders are finding strong support among their base for the Trump administration’s executive order barring travel to the United States from particular Muslim-majority countries. But their plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act was dramatically derailed by factions within their own party.

Democrats, on the other hand, are enjoying energetic backing from their base for pro-immigration and pro-L.G.B.T. stances, but they are experiencing increasing opposition to their support for free trade.

There have been other times in our history when the fabric of American identity was stretched in similar ways — the Civil War, heightened levels of immigration at the turn of the 20th century and the cultural upheavals of the 1960s.

But during these eras, white Christians were still secure as a demographic and cultural majority in the nation. The question at stake was whether they were going to make room for new groups at a table they still owned. Typically, a group would gain its seat in exchange for assimilation to the majority culture. But as white Christians have slipped from the majority over the past decade, this familiar strategy is no longer viable.

White Christians are today struggling to face a new reality: the inevitable surrender of table ownership in exchange for an equal seat. And it’s this new higher-stakes challenge that is fueling the great partisan reorientation we are witnessing today.

The temptation for the Republican Party, especially with Donald Trump in the White House, is to double down on a form of white Christian nationalism, which treats racial and religious identity as tribal markers and defends a shrinking demographic with increasingly autocratic assertions of power.

For its part, the Democratic Party is contending with the difficulties of organizing its more diverse coalition while facing its own tribal temptations to embrace an identity politics that has room to celebrate every group except whites who strongly identify as Christian. If this realignment continues, left out of this opposition will be a significant number of whites who are both wary of white Christian nationalism and weary of feeling discounted in the context of identity politics.

This end is not inevitable, but if we are to continue to make one out of many, leaders of both parties will have to step back from the reactivity of the present and take up the more arduous task of weaving a new national narrative in which all Americans can see themselves.

Filed under Government, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Tenants’ religious rights violated by Brampton landlord who refused to remove shoes

2017/05/04 Leave a comment

Common courtesy should have avoided this having to go to the Human Rights Tribunal:

The Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario has awarded $12,000 to a Muslim couple, who claimed their landlord failed to accommodate their prayer times and notify the wife when she was home alone before bringing in prospective new tenants for apartment viewings.

“The respondent discriminated against the applicants by failing to accommodate their religious practices relating to prayer times by providing advance notice shortly before showing the apartment,” tribunal panel vice-chair Jo-Anne Pickel wrote in a recent 38-page decision.

“He also failed to accommodate their religious practices by refusing to remove his shoes when entering their apartment and especially their prayer space. Finally, he also harassed them, at least in part, because of their religiously-based accommodation requests.”

The decision is believed to be the first of its kind from the tribunal with respect to discrimination based on creed and housing.

The overall intake of human rights cases based on creed has been on the rise, up by 13 per cent to 837 last year compared to 741 in 2015. During the same period the number of inquiries specifically about Muslim identity went up by 39 per cent to 196 cases from 141, said the Human Rights Legal Support Centre.

Pickel rejected the landlord’s argument that the tenants were attempting to “impose their way of life” on others, ruling that there’s no evidence to support the claim.

“This claim by the respondent echoes arguments that have become common within public discourse. Unfortunately, attempts by Muslims to practice their faith have increasingly been interpreted as an attempt to impose their way of life on others,” wrote Pickel.

“Far from seeking to impose their way of life on anyone, the applicants were merely making simple requests for the accommodation of their religious practices.”

According to the tribunal, Walid Madkour and Heba Ismail, who immigrated to Canada from Egypt, moved into their Brampton apartment in December 2014 and agreed a month later to move out of the unit by Feb. 28, 2015 due to issues with the temperature of the apartment, the use of the internet and the request for a quiet environment at night.

The human rights complaint was based on the events and correspondence between the couple and the landlord when the landlord started planning viewings of the apartment to prospective tenants in late February 2015.

Despite repeated requests by Madkour for an additional five-minute warning so his wife had time to put on modest attire before the viewings, the landlord John Alabi — a Christian, according to the ruling — would only provide blocks of time that prospective tenants would be coming, with 24 hours’ notice.

The tribunal found Alabi discriminated against the couple when he failed to comply with their request that he remove his shoes when he entered their apartment and especially when he entered the prayer space in the bedroom, which must be kept “free of any contamination, including any discharge from humans or animals.”

Source: Tenants’ religious rights violated by Brampton landlord who refused to remove shoes | Toronto Star

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

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