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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ICYMI: Quebec City guide to help integrate newcomers derided as insulting, infantilizing

2017/01/20 Leave a comment

Does seem that this guide would have benefited from greater care in its design and emphasis. That being said, it is an effort to capture some unwritten aspects of integration but not whether the content reflects evidence or is based upon the assumptions of the authors:

Immigrants who settle in Quebec City are being offered a new guide to explain local customs, and the authors spare no detail in telling the newcomers how to fit in – for example, refrain from committing incest, wash with soap and use underarm deodorant to “control perspiration and bad odours.”

The guide from city hall was made public last week and has already been condemned as insulting and paternalistic.

“It’s a good idea to prepare something intelligent to help immigrants, but the way it was done is infantilizing,” Anne Guérette, municipal opposition leader in Quebec City, said on Sunday.

Quebec City is one of 13 municipalities across Quebec designated by the province to settle refugees from Syria. While Montreal remains the overwhelming destination of choice for newcomers, more than 550 state-sponsored refugees landed in Quebec City, 400 of them from Syria.

To help them integrate, city hall unveiled a guide last week, “Québec, Une ville pour moi” (Quebec City, A city for me) that spells out “common values” and ways of life in the province’s second-largest city. Some of the values, such as the equality of men and women, are commonly recognized in Canada. Other rules in the booklet, whose contents were first reported in Le Journal de Québec, seem to treat newcomers as if they are joining the civilized world for the first time, or have never bathed.

The section on “Hygiene and body care,” which is accompanied by a diagram of a dark-haired man with a beard, advises brushing one’s teeth at least twice a day “with a toothbrush and toothpaste.” Hand-washing is a must, “especially after going to the bathroom,” among other occasions. Socks and underwear should be washed after each use. And when washing one’s body, “pay particular attention to underarms, feet and intimate parts.”

For household rules, the guide counsels limiting kitchen odours through the use of an oven vent, and removing shoes inside the house to avoid disturbing one’s neighbours. In yet another rule aimed at removing “bad odours,” the guide helpfully suggests opening a window.

Mayor Régis Labeaume defended the guide in Quebec City last week, calling it “completely normal.”

“We could have just talked about sorting household garbage, but that is not enough,” Mr. Labeaume said. “There are practices, ways, traditions that are different,” he said. “There are laws and rules that exist here that might be different from the countries of origin of immigrants. So it’s better to go this far.”

The tips out of Quebec City come as the country debates the notion of defining “Canadian values,” as the country integrates large numbers of newcomers, and as Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch has proposed screening would-be immigrants for “anti-Canadian values.”

Quebec City’s guide, which received funding from the provincial immigration ministry, also has a section on family violence. It says using violence against your spouse violates the Criminal Code, as is using “unreasonable” force or using a belt or ruler to punish your child. Sexual consent is necessary even among married couples. Incest is a crime.

“For example: Brother + sister = illegal. Parent + child = illegal,” the guide spells out.

The guide is being distributed to organizations working with immigrants and refugees. Chantal Gilbert, a city councillor whose responsibilities include minority ethnic communities, says the individual sections can be made available to groups depending on their particular needs.

“There are communities to whom things won’t necessarily apply,” she said. “There are communities that might come from a place that is exactly the same culture as us, though they might need to know how things work for schooling. Even a French person from France comes here and can’t figure out the schooling for their children.”

Source: Quebec City guide to help integrate newcomers derided as insulting, infantilizing – The Globe and Mail

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ICYMI: Will Britain’s new definition of antisemitism help Jewish people? I’m sceptical | David Feldman

2017/01/20 Leave a comment

David Feldman on the risks of the expanded IHRA definition (the examples section) and its lack of recognition of the linkages to other forms of prejudice, discrimination and hate:

The text also carries dangers. It trails a list of 11 examples. Seven deal with criticism of Israel. Some of the points are sensible, some are not. Crucially, there is a danger that the overall effect will place the onus on Israel’s critics to demonstrate they are not antisemitic. The home affairs committee advised that the definition required qualification “to ensure that freedom of speech is maintained in the context of discourse on Israel and Palestine”. It was ignored.

The IHRA definition has been circulating for over a decade and has already been buried once. It is almost identical to the European Union monitoring commission’s working definition, formulated in 2005 as part of the global response to the second intifada in the early 2000s. The definition was never accorded any official status by the EUMC and was finally dropped by its successor body, the Fundamental Rights Agency.

The definition has been resurrected just as we are moving to new times. David Friedman, who will soon become President Trump’s ambassador to Israel, has denounced the “two-state” solution. The prospect of continued Israeli dominion over disenfranchised Palestinians, supported by a US president whose noisome electoral campaign was sustained by nods and winks to anti-Jewish prejudice, is changing the dynamic of Jewish politics in Israel and across the world.

In this new context, the greatest flaw of the IHRA definition is its failure to make any ethical and political connections between the struggle against antisemitism and other sorts of prejudice. On behalf of Jews it dares to spurn solidarity with other groups who are the targets of bigotry and hatred. In the face of resurgent intolerance in the UK, in Europe, the United States and in Israel, this is a luxury none of us can afford.

Source: Will Britain’s new definition of antisemitism help Jewish people? I’m sceptical | David Feldman | Opinion | The Guardian

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ICYMI: In Cancer Trials, a Lopsided Shot at Hope for Minorities – The New York Times

2017/01/20 Leave a comment

Another area where ensuring diversity is important:

Like a man on a flying trapeze, K.T. Jones has leapt from one medical study to another during his 15-year struggle with cancer, and he has no doubt that the experimental treatments he has received have saved his life.

Mr. Jones, 45, has an aggressive type of Hodgkin’s lymphoma that resists the usual therapies. At the start of his most recent clinical trial, his life expectancy was measured in months. That was more than three years ago. He received a drug that helped his immune system fight cancer — a type of immunotherapy, the hottest area in cancer research and treatment.

“I’ve been over 12 months now with no treatment at all,” he said. “I walk half-marathons.”

Mr. Jones is one of many patients who have benefited from lifesaving advances in immunotherapy. But he’s an outlier: He is African-American. As money pours into immunotherapy research and promising results multiply, patients getting the new treatments in studies have been overwhelmingly white. Minority participation in most clinical trials is low, often out of proportion with the groups’ numbers in the general population and their cancer rates. Many researchers acknowledge the imbalance, and say they are trying to correct it.

Two major studies of immunotherapy last year starkly illustrate the problem. The drug being tested was nivolumab, a type of checkpoint inhibitor, one of the most promising drug classes for cancer. In both studies, patients taking it lived significantly longer than those given chemotherapy.

In the first study, of 582 patients with lung cancer, 92 percent were white. Three percent were black, 3 percent were Asian and 3 percent were listed as “other.” In the second study, of 821 people with kidney cancer, 88 percent were white, 9 percent Asian and just 1 percent black.

According to 2015 census figures, whites make up 77 percent of the United States population, blacks 13.3 percent and Asians 5.6 percent.

A 1993 law requires that all medical research conducted or paid for by the National Institutes of Health include enough minorities and women to determine whether they respond to treatment differently than other groups. Minority enrollment in its studies was about 28 percent in clinical research and 40 percent in Phase III clinical trials in 2015, the N.I.H. said.

But the N.I.H. paid for only about 6 percent of all clinical trials in the United States in 2014, and those it does not support do not have to adhere to its rules. The lung and kidney studies of nivolumab, for instance, were paid for by the drug’s maker, Bristol-Myers Squibb. Researchers say such studies, geared toward getting a drug approved for new uses, are often done quickly, and minority patients may be left out because it can take longer to find and enroll them.

One obstacle, researchers say, is that people in minority groups tend to have lower incomes and less education, and therefore less awareness of medical studies and how to find them. Many live in areas that do not have easy access to a major cancer center. Moreover, minority patients with cancer are more likely to have other, poorly controlled chronic diseases like diabetes that may make them ineligible for studies, according to Dr. Julie R. Brahmer, from the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center.

 

Source: In Cancer Trials, a Lopsided Shot at Hope for Minorities

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Most engineers are white — and so are the faces they use to train software – Recode

2017/01/19 Leave a comment

Not terribly surprising but alarming given how much facial recognition is used these days.

While the focus of this article is with respect to Black faces (as it is with the Implicit Association Test), the same issue likely applies to other minority groups.

Welcome any comments from those with experience on how the various face recognition programs in commercial software such as Flicker, Google, Photos etc:

Facial recognition technology is known to struggle to recognize black faces. The underlying reason for this shortcoming runs deeper than you might expect, according to researchers at MIT.

Speaking during a panel discussion on artificial intelligence at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting this week, MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito said it likely stems from the fact that most engineers are white.

“The way you get into computers is because your friends are into computers, which is generally white men. So, when you look at the demographic across Silicon Valley you see a lot of white men,” Ito said.

Ito relayed an anecdote about how a graduate researcher in his lab had found that commonly used libraries for facial recognition have trouble reading dark faces.

“These libraries are used in many of the products that you have, and if you’re an African-American person you get in front of it, it won’t recognize your face,” he said.

Libraries are collections of pre-written code developers can share and reuse to save time instead of writing everything from scratch.

Joy Buolamwini, the graduate researcher on the project, told Recode in an email that software she used did not consistently detect her face, and that more analysis is needed to make broader claims about facial recognition technology.

“Given the wide range of skin-tone and facial features that can be considered African-American, more precise terminology and analysis is needed to determine the performance of existing facial detection systems,” she said.

“One of the risks that we have of the lack of diversity in engineers is that it’s not intuitive which questions you should be asking,” Ito said. “And even if you have a design guidelines, some of this stuff is kind of feel decision.”

“Calls for tech inclusion often miss the bias that is embedded in written code,” Buolamwini wrote in a May post on Medium.

Reused code, while convenient, is limited by the training data it uses to learn, she said. In the case of code for facial recognition, the code is limited by the faces included in the training data.

“A lack of diversity in the training set leads to an inability to easily characterize faces that do not fit the normal face derived from the training set,” wrote Buolamwini.

She wrote that to cope with limitations in one project involving facial recognition technology, she had to wear a white mask so that her face could “be detected in a variety of lighting conditions,” she said.

“While this is a temporary solution, we can do better than asking people to change themselves to fit our code. Our task is to create code that can work for people of all types.”

Source: Most engineers are white — and so are the faces they use to train software – Recode

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Will Hollywood Finally Learn From the Success of ‘Hidden Figures’? – The Atlantic

2017/01/19 Leave a comment

One of the films on my list to see (our daughter saw it and highly recommended it):

… it wouldn’t be hard for major studios to increase the number of films written by women: The ratio in 2015 was 69 percent male to 31 percent female, but by commissioning just five new scripts by women per year, things would be equal by 2018. But the supposed “surprise” of Hidden Figures’s success feels especially galling because it repeats a similar conversation from a year ago. Films like Creed and Straight Outta Compton were smash hits, clearly refuting the discriminatory maxim that films about people of color are more of a box-office risk for studios. A year later, Hidden Figures is “disproving” that trend yet again—even though that kind of backwards thinking about diversity should feel entirely irrelevant by now.

In its first weekend of wide release, Hidden Figures defied tracking numbers that saw it grossing less than the fourth weekend of Rogue One; it made $22 million, also beating out that week’s new blockbuster, Underworld: Brood Wars. For the subsequent four-day Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend, Hidden Figuresactually increased its gross, making $26 million and staying at number one, holding off the expansion of La La Land, the horror film The Bye Bye Man, and Paramount’s broad-skewing children’s adventure Monster Trucks.

That last film provides a particularly interesting lesson in Hollywood economics. The industry, in general, has focused in recent years on films that have the potential to be launching pads for major franchises. As the movie business becomes more globally focused and tries to compete with TVs that can offer a near-theater-quality viewing experience at home, splashy big-budget extravaganzas have become a routine matter of course. This is frequently put forward as an explanation for why Hollywood seems loath to cast actors of color in leading roles, because they supposedly have less market pull worldwide (an argument soundly disproven by hits like the Fast & Furious franchise or Star Wars: The Force Awakens, as well as many smaller-scale films).

And yet Monster Trucks is a patently silly piece of kids entertainment about a young man who finds a squid-like monster living in his truck. It stars Lucas Till, hardly an A-lister (though he had a small role in the recent X-Men movies), and cost $125 million to make—$100 million more than Hidden Figures. Devoting such a large budget to a film with little brand recognition that was basically guaranteed to get terrible reviews was quickly regarded as a disastrous decision. Viacom, the company that owns the Monster Trucks studio Paramount Pictures, took a $115 million write-down in earnings last September in anticipation of its failure (it opened to a lackluster $15 million last weekend).

This is what Hollywood’s emphasis on big-budget films with “broad appeal” inevitably leads to: hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on toy-focused action films with no real audience. For the cost of Monster Trucks, Paramount could have made five Hidden Figures—smaller films, focused on telling grounded stories to fill a market gap that studios continue to ignore. That Hidden Figures’s success has to serve as a lesson to Hollywood in 2017 is ridiculous, but the lesson is nonetheless there to be learned. Audiences are hungry for films that look beyond the movie industry’s narrow worldview. It’s time to start delivering them.

Source: Will Hollywood Finally Learn From the Success of ‘Hidden Figures’? – The Atlantic

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Let’s Work Together To Bring Down Canada’s Hierarchy Of Prejudice | Jack Jedwab

2017/01/19 Leave a comment

From both a policy and operational perspective, there is a challenge of finding a balance between community specific and general anti-discrimination approaches (see my earlier critique of partial approaches – The Canadian government must do more to combat hate crimes in Canada: Fogal, Godoy and Ansong, an example of not building a broad coalition):

Two year-end surveys of Canadians, respectively conducted by Forum Research Group and by Abacus, provide some potentially useful insights into the relationship between discrimination and prejudice. The surveys remind us that prejudice is uneven, and that some groups are viewed less favourably than others. In effect, the surveys reveal that Asians, Blacks and Jews are less likely to be regarded unfavourably by Canadians than are Muslims and Aboriginal Peoples, and that the latter two groups are also more likely than are others to be seen as objects of discrimination.

Although we’ve rarely described it as such, there has always been a hierarchy in the way racial, ethnic and language communities are viewed. Over time, what’s changed is how unfavourably some groups are viewed when compared with others. There is little doubt that prejudice towards Muslims has surged since September 2001 and by consequence they’ve moved to the top of the list of those regarded most unfavourably.

It’s not just where Muslims rank that has evolved. The gap has also widened in the extent to which they’re viewed more unfavourably. As a result, when looking across the list of groups in the two surveys, it’s possible to ascertain that prejudice towards Blacks and Jews is less important than it was in the past, simply by virtue of the fact that the percentage of persons expressing animosity towards them is currently much lower than it is for Muslims.

Eradicating negative stereotypes is essential in the fight against prejudice and discrimination.

This may also give rise to the broader conclusion that societal prejudice and discrimination are in decline. Yet the more cogent observation would be that, with time, there has been a displacement in the degree and the intensity of negative feeling towards those groups that become the object of greater public attention.

Amongst the issues raised by the hierarchy of prejudice and the accompanying perception of discrimination is identifying who’s best situated to combat this destructive phenomenon. It’s a key question for policy makers, educators and anti-racist activists. Often the leaders of those communities whose members are more likely to have experienced prejudice assume that they best understand discrimination and are therefore most qualified to combat it. Conversely, they may also feel that persons who have not been victims of prejudice are ill equipped to deal with it.

Explaining why some groups were liked or overlooked and others were disliked was difficult according to the renowned psychologist Gordon Allport. Yet there is consensus that eradicating negative stereotypes is essential in the fight against prejudice and discrimination. Stereotypes are generalizations that arise when people are either unable or unwilling to acquire the necessary information to make proper assessments about groups. Prejudices are not simple to debunk as they provide reassurance for people’s impressions.

Victims of prejudice may indeed be best placed to undo negative stereotypes about the communities with which they are identified. It’s also true that common stereotypes that serve to denigrate certain groups vary and hence some may assume different approaches are needed to tackle them. In other words, the common stereotypes about Muslims differ from the ones about Jews which in turn differ from those about Blacks, etc. However the removal of one stereotype may have no impact whatsoever on diminishing another. Indeed this appears to be confirmed by the persistence of a hierarchy of prejudice as revealed in the surveys referred to above.

Ideally victims of prejudice should band together across communities to insist that the generalizations that underlie stereotypes are wrong. Ideally they need to work with persons who have not been victims of prejudice and that perhaps previously harbored negative stereotypes and thankfully have since evolved. In the absence of such efforts we can expect some Canadians to continue to provide a rational and/or justification for why some groups deserve to seen more unfavourably than others.

Source: Let’s Work Together To Bring Down Canada’s Hierarchy Of Prejudice | Jack Jedwab

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Austria’s far-right party wants to ‘ban’ Islam – The Washington Post

2017/01/18 Leave a comment

More warning signs in Europe:

The head of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party called on Saturday for a total ban on “fascistic Islam.”

Heinz Christian Strache told an audience in Salzburg that he wanted to see a ban of Muslim symbols, something like the Austrian law that bans Nazi symbols. And he warned that Islam posed an existential threat to Europe. “Let us put an end to this policy of Islamization,” he said. “Otherwise we Austrians, we Europeans will come to an abrupt end.”

The Freedom Party is staunchly anti-immigrant. Stache said Saturday that “we need zero and minus immigration.” The country has received 130,000 claims for asylum since the summer of 2015. Most are former residents of Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.

This attitude has made it hard for young Muslims to feel accepted. One recent study of Muslim youth in Vienna found that many do not feel recognized as Austrians, which has increased the risk of radicalization. According to the survey, “85 percent of young people who are in contact with a youth worker have an immigration background,” and “27 percent of those teenagers who are Muslim show strong sympathy for jihadism, and violent and anti-Western thinking.”

The Freedom Party’s anti-Muslim message has been well-received by a nearly a majority of Austria’s electorate. Its presidential candidate Norbert Hofer was defeated in a runoff vote last month, but gained 47 percent support.

In the Netherlands, the Freedom Party is running on a platform of closing mosques and Islamic schools, banning the Koran and Muslim migrants. It also wants to prohibit women from wearing headscarves. The next election is March 2017, and the party is expected to pick up seats to become the most represented party in the Dutch parliament.

Source: Austria’s far-right party wants to ‘ban’ Islam – The Washington Post

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