U.S. Supreme Court won’t hear ‘Sister Wives’ polygamy appeal

2017/01/25 Leave a comment

Reality tv meets the justice system, but on a technicality:

The U.S. Supreme Court said Monday it won’t hear an appeal from the family on TV’s “Sister Wives” challenging Utah’s law banning polygamy.

The decision ends the family’s long legal fight to overturn a seldom used and unique provision of Utah’s law that the Browns and other polygamous families contend has a chilling effect by sending law-abiding plural families into hiding because of fear of prosecution.

The provision bars married people from living with a second purported “spiritual spouse” even if the man is legally married to just one woman, making it stricter than anti-bigamy laws in other states.

The reality TLC cable channel TV show follows the lives of Kody Brown, his four wives and all their children. When it debuted in 2010, it was considered ground-breaking by offering viewers a glimpse into how a plural family navigates the unique complexities of the arrangement.

Utah prosecutors say they generally leave polygamists alone but that they need the ban to pursue polygamists for other crimes such as underage marriage and sexual assault. Only 10 people were charged with violating the law between 2001 and 2011, prosecutors say.

The Utah Attorney General’s Office declined comment on the Supreme Court’s denial of the case, which the justices issued without comment.

The saga between the Browns and Utah officials began in September 2010 when the first episode aired of the TLC show, “Sister Wives.” A county prosecutor opened an investigation, leading the Browns to leave their longtime of Lehi, Utah, in 2011, to settle in Las Vegas where they still live today.

That same year, the Browns filed a lawsuit calling the opening of the investigation government abuse. The case was closed without filing any charges.

In 2013, the Browns scored a key legal victory when a federal judge in Utah ruled the law violated polygamists’ right to privacy and religious freedom.

But an appeals court in Denver decided last year that the Browns could not sue because they were not charged under the Utah law. It did not consider the constitutional issues. That ruling will now stand.

The Brown’s attorney, Jonathan Turley, said in a statement posted on his blog that he and the family are disappointed but not surprised because the high court is on a pace to hear less than 1 per cent of the 7,500 appeals it is likely to receive this term.

Turley emphasized that an appeals court ruling was not made based on the merits of the Browns’ assertion that Utah’s law violates their rights of speech and religion.

“Our victory in Salt Lake City will remain as a cautionary decision for legislators who wish to marginalize or sanction this community in the future,” Turley said. “It has been a long road for all of us and it is not the end of the road. Plural and unconventional families will continue to strive for equal status and treatment under the law.”

Kody Brown is legally married to Robyn Brown, but says he is “spiritually married” to three other women. They live together in a plural relationship and belong to a religious group that believes in polygamy as a core religious practice. Their show continues to air on TLC.

Source: U.S. Supreme Court won’t hear ‘Sister Wives’ polygamy appeal – Macleans.ca

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Should we ‘ban’ Salafism? – Gurski

2017/01/24 Leave a comment

Good piece by Phil Gurski:

Truth be told, I am no fan of most Salafis (full disclosure: I am not Muslim so my views count for little). I happen to find them arrogant, intolerant and distrustful of Muslims who are not like them (this means most Muslims—look at the figure presented above: of an estimated 4.3 million Muslims in Germany, 10,000— i.e. less than one per cent—are Salafi). In the same way I have little time for fundamentalists of any religion, including my own. But, I don’t tell them how to pray and how to worship—that is not my job. Is the German government now the arbiter of Islam in Germany? Does it really want that job?

This is fraught with problems. Is anyone associated with the German government qualified to determine who is a Salafist and who isn’t? What about divisions within Salafism? Most reputable scholars recognize at least three divisions with only the third—the Salafi jihadis—as a group that must be opposed because they believe in the use of violence to get their way. If Germany cracks down on “Salafists,” whether or not they espouse violence, should it not also ban other fundamentalist groups (Jews, Christians, Hindus…)? If not, why not?

At the end of the day the people best placed to deal with Salafism, if we agree that it is a “problem,” are not those in government, but the communities where it has taken hold. They are the ones most affected by it and they are the ones criticized by those with more intolerant views. They have a vested interest in challenging this issue, not the state. If certain preachers advocate violence, then ban them.

Furthermore, and this is really important, just as there is not a direct correlation/causation between Islam and terrorism, nor is there one on every occasion between Salafi Islam and terrorism. Saying there is is disingenuous. Let’s not make the serious problem of terrorism bigger than it already is. The “escalator” model of terrorism (i.e. that there are concrete steps always present along the pathway to violent extremism) is a poor one and has never been shown to apply universally. This lack of certainty describes the relationship between Salafism and terrorism.

Canada’s 15th prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, famously said that the “state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.” Nor does it have a place in the mosques, pews, synagogues, temples or gurdwaras. If any of these places serve as hub or venue for conspiracy to commit a terrorist act, then that is a different story and the State does have both a right and a duty to get involved. Otherwise, it is wiser to stay out of that domain.

Source: Should we ‘ban’ Salafism? – The Hill Times – The Hill Times

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To Secular Bangladeshis, Textbook Changes Are a Harbinger – The New York Times

2017/01/24 Leave a comment

Not encouraging:

Bangladesh’s Education Ministry was preparing to print the 2017 editions of its standard Bengali textbooks when a group of conservative Islamic religious scholars demanded the removal of 17 poems and stories they deemed “atheistic.”

By the time the books were distributed to schools on Jan. 1, the 17 poems and stories were gone, with no explanation from the government. Other changes had crept in, too: First graders studying the alphabet were taught that “o” stands for “orna,” a scarf worn by devout Muslim girls starting at puberty, not for “ol,” a type of yam; and a sixth-grade travelogue describing a visit to the Hindu-dominated north of India was replaced by one about the Nile in Egypt.

The changes were barely noticeable to the general public, but they alarmed some Bangladesh intellectuals, who saw them as the government’s accommodating a larger shift toward radical Islam.

Bangladesh has struggled to contain extremist violence in recent years, as Islamist militants have targeted secular writers and intellectuals. But equally significant, over the long term, are changes taking place in the general population: The number of women wearing the hijab has gradually risen, as has the number of students enrolled in madrasas, or Islamic schools.

That religious organizations now have a hand in editing textbooks, a prerogative they sought for years, suggests that their influence is growing, even with the Awami League party, which is avowedly secular, in power.

It is a shift that, increasingly, worries the United States. Bangladesh broke away from Pakistan in 1971, and in the decades that followed, it defined itself as adamantly secular and democratic.

For years, this ideology seemed to serve as an insulating force. Transnational jihadist networks that flourished in Afghanistan and Pakistan found little purchase in Bangladesh, despite its dense, poor Muslim population and porous borders.

But over the last several years, as extremist attacks on atheist bloggers and intellectuals became commonplace, secular thought was also fast receding from Bangladesh’s public spaces.

Islamist organizations, analysts say, are so skilled at mobilizing that it has become harder for the government to ignore their demands, especially with a general election coming in 2019.

Hefazat-e-Islam, a vast Islamic organization based in Dhaka, the capital, first called for changes to the textbooks during huge rallies in 2013.

“We went to the higher-ups in the government,” Mufti Fayez Ullah, the group’s joint secretary general, said. “The government realized, ‘Yes, the Muslims should not learn this.’ So they amended it. I want to add that all the political parties, they consider their popularity among the people.”

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Judicial Advisory Committees: Clear signal of increased diversity

2017/01/23 Leave a comment

English media slower to pick this up than Le Devoir.

By way of context, Rosemary Cairns Way in her Deliberate Disregard: Judicial Appointments under the Harper Government, analysed the diversity of the Committees as of May 2014. 12 of the 17 committees were chaired by men, with 70 percent of filled positions held by men (her analysis did not include visible minorities or Indigenous peoples).

The Government, in a significant implementation of the government’s diversity and inclusion agenda, has essentially flipped this around as the following charts demonstrate for seven of the appointment committees.

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The regional variations generally overweight all groups in relation to the local demographics with some exceptions (e.g., Ontario GTA representation of visible minorities). Three of the seven committees are headed by women.

Overtime, and in line with the 2016 judicial appointments, this should further increase diversity on the bench:

With the number of judicial vacancies reaching near-record levels, the Liberal government has revived a dormant appointment process, and signalled that it intends to change the face of the judiciary.

It named the members of seven newly constituted screening committees for the federal bench last week. Each of the committees has a majority of women.

The announcement of the judicial advisory committees comes as full-time vacancies are at 57 across the country, and as courts are struggling to meet Supreme Court deadlines for timely justice. In the fall, murder charges in Alberta and Ontario were thrown out for unreasonable delay. All judicial advisory committees from Ontario to Newfoundland and Labrador have been without any members at all since at least last April. And the government removed the members of all other committees in October.

The government announcement still leaves 10 of the 17 committees across Canada without members. A spokeswoman for Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould said the government named the committees in areas with high numbers of judicial vacancies.

The federal government asked members of the public, including non-lawyers, to apply for three federally appointed spots on each committee back in mid-October, allowing one month to do so. The Liberals were critical of the appointment process under the Conservatives for what they called its lack of openness and a lack of diversity in appointments. While the government devised a new system, it appointed just 39 judges (some of them promotions, or the naming of regional judges) in the 16 months since the Liberals took office. Chief Justice Neil Wittmann of the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench said publicly his court had grown desperate.

Rob Nicholson, the Conservatives’ justice critic, is critical of delays in the appointment process. “I still don’t understand why it has taken them so long to make the judicial appointments that it is their responsibility to make,” he said in an interview. It is important to make timely appointments “because when there’s an absence of judges, cases will get thrown out. That does not help the credibility of the justice system.” He said he is “fine” with the majority of members being women.

The Justice Minister did not respond to questions about when the committees would begin recommending candidates, and when the government would make its first appointments from those recommendations. The committees do not pick judges, but they create the pool of approved candidates from which the federal government makes its choices.

Some legal observers consider the federal government’s authority to appoint judges a major yet underappreciated exercise of its power. Former prime minister Stephen Harper changed the process soon after taking office to give Ottawa’s appointees on the committees a voting majority: he added a police representative, and took away the vote from judges who sat on committees. He also removed the “highly qualified” category, to leave the government more leeway to choose. Under the Conservatives, 30 per cent of applicants for the federal judiciary, which includes the Federal Court, Tax Court and superior courts in the provinces, were women, and 30 per cent of appointees were women. Little more than a handful of new judges were visible minorities, though in its decade in office the Conservatives did promote several minorities from lower courts to higher ones.

The Liberals have now undone all the Conservative changes. The police representative is gone. The legal community (the Canadian Bar Association, the law society, the provincial Attorney-General and a Chief Justice) appoints four of the seven members, and the federal government advertised for candidates for the remaining three positions from the general public. While the names of members on previous committees were public, the government now publishes capsule biographies on each. Several have a background in social causes, such as Bruce Rivers of Toronto, executive director of Covenant House, which serves homeless youth, and Jelle Jeen Van Ens of Beaver County, Alta, a social worker.

In all, 34 of the 49 members named so far to the committees are women. On two of the new committees, there is just one man out of seven members, and on two others, just two men. That contrasts sharply with the committees during the Conservative years; most committees had a majority of men, and some committees (Saskatchewan’s and the one for Ontario West and South) had no women members at all.

There are also several visible-minority members on the seven committees announced last week, including an African-Canadian former deputy police chief from Toronto, and two members of First Nations from British Columbia.

In a news release, Ms. Wilson-Raybould said the committee members will receive training in the importance of judicial diversity from Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin. An accompanying fact sheet explains that they will watch her give a speech on videotape. It’s a shortened version of one she gave in Scotland in 2012: “The first attitude that the judge must cultivate is introspectiveness. A judge must be willing to take moral stock of herself. … In a diverse society introspection is essential to ensuring that the phenomenon of difference confronting the judge does not skew the decision-making process.”

Of the 39 judges appointed by the Liberals since they took office in November, 2015, 24 are women.

Source: Petite révolution judiciaire à Ottawa | Le Devoir, New advisory committees could change the face of Canada’s judiciary

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Douglas Todd: Canada needs strong dose of ‘cultural curiosity | Vancouver Sun

2017/01/23 Leave a comment

Interesting conversation between Douglas Todd and Ara Norenzayan, a UBC social psychologist and the need to understand difference better rather than assuming no difference. Their discussion turns more challenging when it comes to considering what differences are acceptable and what is not:

We started our conversation with Norenzayan describing three of the benefits social psychologists and anthropologists have discovered about diversity.

“Diversity concentrates talent,” Norenzayan said. Cities, universities and businesses can advance when talented people gather together from diverse cultures.

In addition “diverse groups are more creative at problem solving,” Norenzayan said. Laboratory experiments show groups of varied people can imagine many novel uses for an object that a more homogeneous group sees in a limited way.

Thirdly, people in diverse contexts can learn the skill of interacting without polarizing. Norenzayan cited summer camps in which young Jews and Palestinians become friends, the prime route to cross-cultural understanding.

But there are potential downsides to diversity, which should not be denied.

The most obvious is that diversity can lead to self-segregation.

I have written about the startling degree to which ethnic Chinese, South Asians, Caucasians and others are forming ethnic enclaves in Metro Vancouver, a region that demographers call “hyper-diverse” since 45 per cent of the population is foreign born.

“People are less likely to get to know their neighbours if they live in diverse neighbourhoods. Contact diminishes,” Norenzayan said.

It’s happening at UBC, which is a predominantly ethnic Asian campus. “Asian students and non-Asian students self-segregate.”

Diversity “can unravel very fast”

….Canada is not on the verge of becoming like divided Lebanon. But that strife-torn country is a chilling example of how diversity can suddenly turn to polarization.

“People used to think of Lebanon as a model of a society that was very diverse,” Norenzayan said. Muslims, Christians, Lebanese, Palestinians and others tended to get along.

“But, in 1975, it unravelled very fast. So I don’t have any illusions.”

Although few can explain why Lebanon boiled over, Norenzayan said it “doesn’t take much to poison the well.” Certain events in Lebanon incited groups that once tolerated each other to turn to identity politics, inducing “a spiral of negativity” that continues to this day.

Even though most countries of the world don’t accept any immigrants, some that do, like the U.S., Britain, France and the Netherlands, have in recent years experienced a rapid rise of immigration-skeptical nativism.

Despite decades of official multiculturalism, Norenzayan worries many Canadians still think that being honest about cultural differences is the same as stereotyping. And the last thing any Canadian wants to be called is racist or xenophobic, however unfairly.

“The first thing to do is tell people difference is OK. It’s not prejudice to recognize people have different beliefs,” Norenzayan said.

Social psychologists, for instance, have found through experiments that most people in the West value independence, choice and self-realization.

But in Chinese and Korean cultures, research shows group cohesion and obedience are tied into morality.

“My Chinese students are extremely respectful of authority,” Norenzayan said. When he asks Chinese students to call him “Ara,” he says most “just can’t do it. They think it’s immoral. They believe deference to authority is a moral value.”

Another Asian value that Westerners don’t get, said Norenzayan, is purity.

While Hindu temple priests expect visitors to take their shoes off before entering as an act of purity, he said many Westerners think it’s just etiquette. But purity codes have powerful consequences throughout Asia.

“Cultural curiosity” recognizes differences

The more we explore diversity, the more we may find some cultural differences morally disturbing, depending on whether we’re liberal, conservative or in-between.

Even though we should avoid a rush to judgment, Norenzayan said a diverse society like Canada “has to make some choices” about how far to go in accepting some cultural differences.

I asked Norenzayan what he thought about Toronto Muslim Zunera Ishaq’s successful fight in 2015 to wear a face-covering niqab during her citizenship ceremony.

“I personally don’t agree with niqabs, but I don’t think there should be a law that bans them,” he said. “There are lot of things I don’t like that other people do. Where do you stop? If (polls show most of) the Canadian population doesn’t like something, do we ban it?”

When I responded that European courts appear to be making reasonable decisions to ban women wearing niqabs while working with young people in daycare centres or public schools, Norenzayan added he believed RCMP officers should likely not be permitted to wear niqabs.

He also felt strongly about polygamy. His former UBC colleague, Joe Heinrich, discovered that polygamist societies tend to be “more violent and more gender unequal.”

If Canada were to legalize polygamy, Norenzayan said, it would make the country “a magnet for polygamous immigrants,” which he thinks would be harmful.

Compared to many countries, Canadian multiculturalism is maintaining a certain calm. We’re often ranked as one of the world’s most “tolerant” nations.

“But we don’t really know why,” Norenzayan said. He emphasized we need to figure it out.

We speculated the country’s relative peace and good order could have something to do with our protected borders and general Canadian “civility,” which has long historical roots.

We also agreed Canadians’ overall acceptance of diversity flows from a highly selective migration policy. Most countries don’t allow any immigration, but those that do constantly adjust intake criteria, and levels, in search of the sweet spot that encourages integration.

Since Norenzayan has experienced how easily a hyper-diverse region can descend to tribalism, he feels more urgency than most about enhancing Canada’s relative harmony,

Instead of being “culture blind” and pretending no differences exist, Norenzayan says society needs to offer more Canadians a chance to experience positive contact across cultures.

I couldn’t agree more when he suggests the attitude necessary to make that happen is the genuine practise of cultural curiosity.

Source: Douglas Todd: Canada needs strong dose of ‘cultural curiosity | Vancouver Sun

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How America’s anti-elitism might be creating a whiter White House – The Washington Post

2017/01/21 Leave a comment

Good analysis on the relative lack of diversity in the Trump cabinet, from a variety of perspectives:

As his Cabinet nominees were grilled by the Senate on the eve of his inauguration, President-elect Donald Trump declared that “We have by far the highest IQ of any Cabinet ever assembled!”

It’s a grandiose assertion, one that’s impossible to know. But by another metric, Trump’s nominees fall short: academic degrees.

As a whole, Trump’s picks to lead the nation’s government agencies have fewer advanced degrees than any first-term Cabinet in at least 24 years.

A third of the nominees in Trump’s 15-member executive team hold only a bachelor’s degree. A quarter obtained up to a master’s degree, and 40 percent achieved a law or medical degree. No one has a doctorate. Compare that to President Obama’s original Cabinet, which conservatives derided for being stacked with intellectual elites: Only two members held a bachelor’s degree alone. A third stopped their educations at a master’s degree, and more than half held doctorates, medical or law degrees — often from the nation’s most prestigious universities.

Certainly, education comes in many of forms. For some of Trump’s nominees, what they lack in classroom education has been made up for in relevant career experience. But there’s something uniquely important about schooling — it’s supposed to be America’s great equalizer, the traditional gateway to the higher levels of society. At least for people of color.

In 2008, it wasn’t lost on people that Obama’s nominated Cabinet was both loaded with academic credentials and among the most racially and ethnically diverse in history. Six of the 15 nominees belonged to minority groups, all of whom held advanced degrees. Obama himself has a Harvard law degree and was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. (Bill Clinton’s first Cabinet included just as many minorities as Obama’s, and it was even more educated, with all but one Cabinet member holding doctorate or law degrees.)

Similarly, observers today say it’s no coincidence that Trump’s proposed Cabinet is both the least academically credentialed and the least diverse in recent history. There are just two minorities among Trump’s Cabinet nominees, an African American and an Asian American. Both of them have advanced degrees. (His would be the first presidential Cabinet since Ronald Reagan not to include a Latino member.)

Trump’s Cabinet also happens to be the wealthiest in modern history — illustrating how it’s possible for some to reach the top without racking up college degrees. That level of success without years of advanced education is nearly impossible for black and brown Americans, say sociologists, economists and political scientists who study the link between race, education and achievement.

“Rarely will we find an example of an uncredentialed black person in an elite position,” said Darrick Hamilton, an economist at The New School in New York. “That black person is usually certainly qualified, if not overqualified, with regard to their education.”

The makeup of Trump’s Cabinet reflects a growing disdain in America for intellectual elitism and a distrust of scientific empiricism. Trump, the first president not to hold an advanced degree since George H.W. Bush, tapped into that sentiment in his unprecedented campaign by slamming the “Washington elite,” rallying against the “political correctness” often tied to academia, and misstating the facts on climate change and President Obama’s citizenship.

“As higher education has become more accessible to more diverse groups of people, the general population has become more distrustful of education and expertise,” said Tressie McMillan Cottom, a sociologist at Virginia Commonwealth University. “They think there must be something suspect about education, because how great can Harvard really be if someone like Barack Obama got there?”

“In this country, diversity has gotten tied up in the idea of a liberal academy,” she said. “The election of Trump is a critique and rebuke of that.”

Source: How America’s anti-elitism might be creating a whiter White House – The Washington Post

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Globe editorial: Toronto Pride parade marches backwards

2017/01/21 Leave a comment

Agree:

Toronto, the non-profit organization that holds Toronto’s annual Pride Parade, lists “inclusivity” as one of its main values. “We welcome everyone and want everyone to be welcomed,” reads the group’s website.

They should rewrite that. Pride Toronto has officially banned Toronto Police Services from putting a float in the parade, or having stands along the route. LGBTQ people who are police officers can march on their own, but not as an identifiable group.

It’s a horribly misguided decision. Yes, we know, Toronto’s Pride Parade began in 1981 in part as a reaction to police harassment of the city’s gay community. The history is real. But it’s also history.

Last summer, members of Black Lives Matter Toronto held a sit-in during the parade, bringing it to a standstill for half an hour. The group only ended its blockade when Pride Toronto officials agreed to its demands, one of which was that police participation be banned.

Black Lives Matter is a group that spends a lot of its energy protesting the police. In a democratic society, it has every right to. It also has reason to: Police often deserve to be criticized – the TPS’s long-standing practice of carding, which fell most heavily on black Torontonians, was only recently curtailed by provincial legislators.

BLM thinks it’s taking Pride Toronto back to its protest roots. After all, the police weren’t invited to take part in the first gay pride rally in 1981. And now Pride Toronto, in deference to a group that claims to speak for all black Torontonians, has agreed to go back in time.

But surely Pride Toronto would agree that the willingness of groups to work with the police to end harassment has been a key part of the social progress that has made Toronto one of the world’s most diverse and tolerant cities. The Pride weekend is a hugely popular annual event and a major symbol of Toronto’s inclusivity. Or it used to be, anyway.

Then there is the fact that Pride Toronto has agreed to the ban while accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in support from all levels of government. To take that money and then discriminate against members of an important public institution is problematic, to put it mildly. There will be a taint on this year’s parade if the ban isn’t lifted.

Source: Globe editorial: Toronto Pride parade marches backwards – The Globe and Mail

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Montréalais soupçonné de terrorisme: «Ils ont tout fait pour me radicaliser» 

2017/01/21 Leave a comment

Interesting testimony by one radicalized Québécois, and the contribution that feeling second-class made in his radicalization journey:

Les parents de Wassim, des immigrants algériens, ne sont pas particulièrement religieux, dit-il. Lui s’est tourné vers la religion vers l’âge de 18 ans, notamment parce qu’il dit ne pas avoir trouvé sa place dans la société québécoise.

« J’ai grandi dans Côte-des-Neiges et après dans Outremont, et les gens étaient toujours en train de m’emmerder. Ils me disaient de retourner dans mon pays. Ils me demandaient si je parlais français. Je suis né à Montréal. Où est-ce qu’ils voulaient que je retourne ? Avec des histoires comme ça, j’ai commencé à détester tout le pays. »

Le jeune homme raconte s’être souvent senti traité comme un citoyen de deuxième classe. « On se sent pas chez nous. T’as pas les mêmes chances. T’es pas traité de la même façon tant que t’es pas comme eux, dit-il. Tu vas voir les Québécois et ils te rejettent. J’ai dit OK, je vais revenir à mes origines. »

« Je le dis sans vouloir insulter, mais les anglophones sont plus gentils avec nous. » Il raconte avoir été marqué, adolescent, par « l’affaire Hérouxville » en 2007, alors que le conseil municipal du village de la Mauricie avait adopté un code de conduite pour les immigrants, et par les accommodements raisonnables. Il a suivi le débat entourant la charte des valeurs à distance, en 2014.

« C’est juste au Québec que ça arrive. Ça confirme ce que je pense. Je ne sais pas si je serais parti si j’avais grandi dans une autre province. »

Se considère-t-il comme un radical ? « Pourquoi est-ce qu’un juif qui va se battre pour son peuple n’est pas vu comme radical ? Ça n’a pas de sens. Selon la définition du gouvernement canadien, oui, je suis radical. Je ne mentirai pas. Mais à mes yeux, je ne suis pas radical. Je ne suis pas extrémiste. Pour moi, être radicalisé, c’est quand t’es tellement obtus dans tes opinions que tu n’acceptes rien d’autre. Je ne suis pas comme ça. »

Il affirme qu’il soutiendrait n’importe quel État où la loi islamique est appliquée, mais qu’il est contre le groupe armé État islamique. « Ils sont hors de l’islam. Ils sont devenus fous. »

Jamais il ne reviendra au Canada, dit-il.

Des membres du groupe soupçonné dans l’affaire de la prise d’otages, aucun n’a été arrêté, mais l’enquête se poursuit.

Source: Montréalais soupçonné de terrorisme: «Ils ont tout fait pour me radicaliser» | Gabrielle Duchaine | Justice et affaires criminelles

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Canada sees ‘dramatic’ spike in online hate — here’s what you can do about it

2017/01/21 1 Comment

Useful to have this tracking of trends given that police-reported hate crime statistics, while needed and useful, only tell part of the story:

The internet can be a pretty intolerant place, and it may be getting worse.

An analysis of Canada’s online behaviour commissioned by CBC’s Marketplace shows a 600 per cent jump in the past year in how often Canadians use language online that’s racist, Islamophobic, sexist or otherwise intolerant.

“That’s a dramatic increase in the number of people feeling comfortable to make those comments,” James Rubec, content strategist for media marketing company Cision, told Marketplace.

Cision scanned social media, blogs and comments threads between November 2015 and November 2016 for slurs and intolerant phrases like “ban Muslims,” “sieg heil” or “white genocide.” They found that terms related to white supremacy jumped 300 per cent, while terms related to Islamophobia increased 200 per cent.

“It might not be that there are more racists in Canada than there used to be, but they feel more emboldened. And maybe that’s because of the larger racist sentiments that are coming out of the United States,” Rubec said.

So when you see hateful speech online, what can you do about it?

Marketplace‘s Asha Tomlinson joined journalist and cultural critic Septembre Anderson and University of Ontario Institute of Technology sociologist Barbara Perry, whose work focuses on hate crimes, to share strategies and tips for confronting intolerance online.

Reach out

If the person making hurtful comments is a friend, message them privately about it. Calling them out publicly can backfire.

Source: Canada sees ‘dramatic’ spike in online hate — here’s what you can do about it – Canada – CBC News

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ICYMI: How a country gets forged in the classrooms: Salutin

2017/01/20 Leave a comment

Good piece on the integrative role of the public school:

My friend and neighbour Rob Vipond, who’s a political science prof and whose daughter Susanna looks after our cat and turtle when we’re at the lake, has written a neighbourhood book brimming with love. It’ll be out this spring. He says it’s the “biography of a school” — Clinton Street Junior Public, where both our kids went. It’s a nonacademic book, full of academic rigour and insight.

He had the great idea of focusing on public schools as incubators of citizenship. Private schools can teach about citizenship but can’t ever embody it, since people go there in a private role, vs. as taxpaying members of society. Public schools are labs, not just for studying citizens but for growing them.

As a poli-sci guy, Rob is also chronically fascinated by the place of the state and formal political structures, and schools are an ideal field for study since, as he says, they are “the one state institution with which many citizens have daily and recurring interaction.” In a downtown school in The Six, like Clinton, those interactions for about a century have revolved around dealing with newcomers.

So he tells three stories. One is about “Jewish Clinton,” during the first half of the last century, when Clinton was largely Jewish. Canada still saw itself as a “Christian country,” making it hard for Jewish arrivals to feel like full citizens. Then in 1944, Ontario’s Tory premier made religious i.e., Christian, instruction mandatory, like math or science.

Clinton’s response was basically to ignore the law without kicking up a fuss. It was brilliant, a subtle form of civil disobedience, which made it possible for Jewish families to gradually acquire a full sense of being Canadian rather than having second-class quality thrust upon them.

The eras of Italian Clinton and Global Clinton followed, during which Canada groped its way toward “multiculturalism” while governments added laws and bureaucracies. But at Clinton, the effort to construct “multicultural citizenship” was “all part of the daily routine.” The meaning of multicultural got sorted out right there — in classrooms and at recess. The challenge was “to pay respect to the country’s … legacy” while adapting it to “the needs and aspirations” of newcomers.

Could you integrate them without stigmatizing their heritage as “an obstacle course to overcome?” Could they contribute as themselves? “A real sense of belonging” is hard to attain if it means betraying your own identity, which you brought with you. These issues are still unresolved, as Tory leadership provocateur Kellie Leitch reminds us. But practically speaking, at Clinton, it meant “Toronto’s students might well learn something from their newly arrived classmates.”

Let me add a footnote here, based on my own teaching of a half course in the Canadian studies program at U of T over several decades. The names on my class lists have changed mightily, as Clinton’s did over a longer time. When I started, the program seemed more or less designed for people from north Toronto. The courses were basically variations on Atwood (for culture) and Innis (for social science/history): two Canadian academic staples, like timber or the beaver.

But over the years, Canadian studies added Asian-Canadian, Chinese-Canadian, Jewish-Canadian, aboriginal, etc., courses and “chairs” — the lively mélange would probably have been unimaginable to those who set it up in the late 1970s. The north Toronto contingent still attends but, as Rob says, they learn something in return from their more recently arrived classmates.

In fact, we all win. For those of us teaching, we can’t just toss out headings (federal-provincial relations, Rocket Richard, the nativity story). We can toss them out, but we also have to fill them in. It’s good for us, it reveals our assumptions, especially to ourselves, and leads to treatment of glossed-over issues.

We, in turn, learn about, oh: Model Minorities and Cooking in Madeleine Thien’s Simple Recipes; The Critical Role of Cultural Beliefs in Shaping the Perceptions of Mental Health by Chinese-Canadians; The Emergence of Queer Punk in Toronto; along with old friends like, An Appraisal of the War of 1812 and, BlackBerry: Canadian or Not? (All covered in the CanStudies student journal, IMAGINATIONS.)

This doesn’t just reflect what Canadian studies has become, it’s what Canada has become, despite the urgent efforts of Leitch and others to dictate our meaning to us, from the top down. Maybe she should sign up for some courses.

Source: How a country gets forged in the classrooms: Salutin | Toronto Star

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