Non-Jewish community leaders should stand up against antisemitism too

2024/08/27 Leave a comment

More calls to action. How effective these calls are on the ground remains to be seen:

In response to more than 100 Jewish institutions across Canada receiving identical bomb threats, Deborah Lyons, Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, wrote, “These threats against the Jewish community are intended to intimidate and sow fear. The vast silent majority of Canadians finds the harassment and intimidation of the Jewish community of Canada vile and unacceptable. It is past time to stand up and say NO MORE.” 

While largely silent today, we have seen courageous acts of leadership from the non-Jewish community in the past. In 1947, a broad-based coalition of allies came together to form the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews — an organization whose mission was to push back against antisemitism and religious-based hate. With chapters across Canada, it became the leading forum for dialogue and understanding between Christians and Jews.

In 2004, in the wake of antisemitic incidents in Toronto and Montreal, then-Bank of Montreal President and CEO Tony Comper and his late wife, Elizabeth, formed a coalition called Fighting Antisemitism Together or FAST. It was pointedly made up exclusively of non-Jewish business leaders. The CEOs of Canada’s leading corporations lent their own names and their companies’ names to full page ads that ran in major Canadian newspapers.

The October 7th terrorist attacks by Hamas and the increase in antisemitism have brought back painful memories from the horrors of the Holocaust and millennia of dangerous demonization and discrimination. Today, Canada urgently needs a whole-of-society commitment to denouncing and eradicating antisemitism, and that takes courageous leadership.

Our business leaders need to speak up and push back. The chamber movement can play a critical role through its local chapters across Canada. Our national business organizations should be speaking up too.  

Our university leaders especially need to push back. Every Jewish student needs to feel safe from harassment and violence on and off campus. And all students, and their professors, must demonstrate tolerance for, and even curiosity about, the views and cultures of others. That’s, arguably, the core mission of universities. At the moment, too many of our universities are failing in that regard.

Municipal leaders need to ensure that their police forces have the resources they need to uphold and enforce our laws.

Our provincial political leaders need to follow the lead of Ontario and British Columbia and ensure that teaching curriculums provide facts and context about antisemitism and the Holocaust.

Federal leaders need to communicate clearly that antisemitism is antithetical to Canadian values, and it is an affront to democratic norms and freedoms everywhere. So too do our senior public servants.

Faith leaders from across the spectrum need to use their pulpits to promote unity and understanding across all peoples of faith.

Canada has been deeply enriched by its Jewish community, which has made tremendous contributions to every aspect of our society. Our leading universities, hospitals, and research institutes have also benefitted incredibly from cooperation, collaboration, and people-to-people exchanges with their counterparts in Israel.

Every Jew in Canada should feel safe, protected, proud and unhindered from religious practice, welcomed and supported by their classmates, colleagues and community. Simply put, there is no place in Canada for antisemitism.

The poem First They Came by Pastor Martin Niemöller should be a cautionary note to all minorities in Canada. Where antisemitism flourishes, so too do other forms of hate and intolerance. It threatens not just the Jewish community, but all of us and our social fabric.

As non-Jews, we believe this is no time to be a bystander. It’s time for non-Jewish leaders from all walks of life to speak up and push back against antisemitism as they have in the past. As Tony Comper told the Empire Club two decades ago, “Non-Jews must join the battle against what has been described sadly, but accurately, as the oldest and longest of hatreds.”

All Canadians need to communicate clearly to their Jewish neighbors, classmates, and colleagues that they are not alone: Canadians stand with the Jewish community and have their backs against antisemitism.

Hon. Paul Tellier was Clerk of the Privy Council and president and chief executive officer of CN and Bombardier, Hon. Kevin Lynch was Clerk of the Privy Council and vice chair of BMO Financial Group, Andrew Molson is Chair of AVENIR Global, Paul Deegan is CEO of Deegan Public Strategies

Source: Non-Jewish community leaders should stand up against antisemitism too

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LILLEY: Islamic hate preacher now on tour across Canada

2024/08/26 Leave a comment

Sigh….:

Imagine a controversial Christian preacher from the U.S. who tells his followers that Muslims are our enemy being allowed to tour this country.

Would the Trudeau government allow such a preacher to conduct a lecture tour if he taught that all Muslims are liars who cheat, and that homosexuals are animals?

It’s doubtful — but if it did happen, there would be outrage and demonstrations outside of the tour locations.

Right now, though, there is a Muslim preacher who holds these very views, except about Jews, touring Canada. Assim Al-Hakeem, an Imam based in Saudi Arabia, has already visited Calgary, Milton, Mississauga and Hamilton, and will be in London on Saturday, Montreal on Sunday and Vancouver next Tuesday.

There haven’t been any protests but it’s not clear if that is because Imam Al-Hakeem says protests are banned in Islam, one of many bizarre views this preacher holds. He also believes women should not share workplaces with men and that they should always be covered.

He’s now spreading his message of hate across Canada, a place he calls a “Kafir” country — meaning infidel.

“May Allah liberate it from the oppressors and our enemies, the Jews,” Al-Hakeem said in a recent broadcast discussing the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

Though based in Saudi Arabia, Al-Hakeem broadcasts online worldwide to a mostly English-speaking audience. When it comes to Jews, he sees them not only as enemies of Islam but as constantly conspiring against Islam.

“We acknowledge that through history the Jews collaborating with the hypocrites had many conspiracies against Islam,” Al-Hakeem said while discussing the Illuminati and Freemasons. “The collaboration and the fingerprints of the Jews, the hypocrites, and the Rafidah is evident.”

Is this the language and thinking we want being spread in Canada at a time when anti-Semitic attacks against Jews have skyrocketed? Is this what we want being preached in the same week that more than 100 Jewish schools, hospitals, community centres and synagogues were targeted with bomb threats?

Watching Al-Hakeem’s videos and reading his writings, it is clear that this man is an Islamic supremacist. He says that Muslims cannot take up the citizenship of Kafir countries, he was specifically talking about Canada, and that the laws of Kafir countries aren’t to be followed.

In another video, he describes how when Islam comes to your country you have two options, submit to Islam or pay the jizyah tax, and if you won’t accept either of those, then Muslims will fight you. As he says Muslims will fight you, he makes a knife across the throat motion with his hand.

The Trudeau government has done plenty to keep out people with less offensive views than this man, but Imam Al-Hakeem gets to enter freely, tour the country and not be harassed.

It was just a couple of weeks ago that Tommy Robinson, a British national, was arrested and had his passport confiscated while on a speaking tour of Canada. He was essentially harassed over his views, which are often described as anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant.

With Al-Hakeem, we have a man who calls Canada a Kafir country, teaches that Muslims don’t need to obey Canadian laws, and has said vile things about Jews, homosexuals and women, yet he is free to tour and preach his hatred.

Source: LILLEY: Islamic hate preacher now on tour across Canada

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McWhorter: The deeper grammatical logic of “weird”

2024/08/24 Leave a comment

Interesting analysis of “weird” and how it works for well:

When Gov. Tim Walz called Donald Trump and his worldview “weird,” it got immediate attention, launched a thousand memes and may very well have helped him land the job as Kamala Harris’s running mate. Michelle Obama’s dictum that “when they go low, we go high” is admirable, but there’s a lot to be said for the occasional step or two down the ladder. To many observers, “weird” immediately seemed right, a fresh approach to the mix of childish cattiness and outright menace coming from opponents of Walz and Harris. But the reasons for its success as an epithet aren’t as obvious. They come from deep in the word’s history, and in the ultimate purpose to which we put language.

In Old English the word meant, believe it or not, “what the future holds,” as in what we now refer to as fate. The sisters in “Macbeth” were the “weird sisters,” in the meaning of “fate sisters,” telling the future. But they were also portrayed as ghoulish in appearance and attire. With the prominence of this play and similar fate-sister figures in other ones, the sense set in that “weird” meant frighteningly odd.

In the 20th century, the word lost its hint of the macabre as its meaning became something quieter. “Weird” now means peculiar — perhaps passingly so, but against what one would expect.

In this sense, “weird” has settled into a realm of the language that isn’t taught as grammar in our schools but should be. Verbal communication is not only about whether something is in the past or the future, or whether it is singular or plural. It’s also about what is novel. We tend to seek people’s attention to tell them something they don’t yet know.

Imagine someone new to the English language asking you what the “even” in “He even had a horse” means. It would be hard, because school doesn’t teach us about the role that identifying novelty plays in how we form sentences. “He even had a horse” implies that someone’s possession of a horse, as opposed to just a big backyard, a fence and some dogs, is unexpected. All languages have ways of doing this. In Saramaccan, a language I have studied that was created by Africans who escaped slavery in Suriname, a little word, “noo” — pronounced “naw” — shows that something is news. “Noo mi o haika i” means not just “I will call you” but also “So, OK then, I will call you.”

Applying “weird” to MAGA is a great debate team tactic, a deceptively complex rhetorical trick that uses the simplest of language to make a sophisticated point: that the beliefs that MAGA is supposed to be getting us back to defy expectation, usually for the simple reason that they’re false.

The idea that Central American countries engage in an effort to send criminals to America not only is mean, it also fails to accord with any intuitive or documented analysis. The idea that we should all go smilingly back to an era when it was illegal for women to obtain an abortion — as though there was something sweet about Roberta’s situation in Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” in 1925 — goes against what 90 percent of Americans espouse. It is callous to a degree that a great many find perplexing. The idea that a single woman without children is less qualified to lead is jarring even amid the trash talk flying throughout our political landscape.

The typical response to all of this from the outside is to shudder at the nastiness. But an equally valid response is “Huh?” And that’s why “weird” works.

“Weird” works in another way, too: There is no great comeback. You can’t respond to being called peculiar by simply saying, “No, I’m not,” though Trump tried: “He said we’re weird,” the candidate complained, “that JD and I are weird. I think we’re extremely normal people, exactly like you.” Just asserting it convinces no one. Nor does the “No, you are!” defense. On X, Representative Matt Gaetz jibed: “The party of gender blockers and drag shows for kids is calling us weird? Ok.” But we’ve heard all that before. “Weird” is a way to call out the unexpected. Any perceived weirdness on the left is old news. It’s the Democrats who are offering the novel take.

The goal here is not getting down into the mud but opening ourselves to broader perception. Outsiders can view MAGA with dismay, intimidated by how many people subscribe to it, watch its adherents portray themselves as the only true Americans and shake our heads in horror and submission. Or we can dismiss MAGA as more heat than light. We can resist the notion that the essence of America is an ideology whose figurehead lost the popular vote in the presidential election of 2016, lost the election entirely in 2020 and may well lose again this fall. “Weird” pegs MAGA as a detour, a regrettable temptation that a serious politics ought to render obsolete. Calling it “weird” is deft, articulate, and possibly prophetic.

It’s also an example of the power of language, in particular a kind of grammar that too few people are taught. Wouldn’t more kids take interest in the subject if they knew they could use it to shut down a bully?

Source: The deeper grammatical logic of “weird”

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Urback: A mass bomb threat against Jews? Who could have seen that coming?

2024/08/24 Leave a comment

Satirical yet pointed:

…But even then, what would have given someone such a sense of impunity that they would threaten 100 Jewish institutions at once? Was it Winnipeg’s mayor taking downthe city’s menorah, or Moncton’s mayor doing the same? Or Calgary’s mayor skippingthe city’s menorah-lighting ceremony, or Toronto’s mayor declining to attend the Walk with Israel? Was it the empty words offered by Canadian politicians, over and over again, in lieu of action each time a Jewish institution is attacked?

Or maybe these individuals were emboldened by the national indifference this country has shown toward the targeting of Catholic churches, dozens of which have been set ablaze over the course of the last few years? Maybe it was the constant dismissal of the concerns of Jews feeling unsafe in Canada, because, as many have taken to saying now, why should anyone care about hurt feelings here, when people are dying in Gaza?

If only there were warnings, beyond the threats, violence, vandalism, harassment, cultural exclusion, institutional antisemitism, empty words and constant gaslighting. And when – not if – someone gets seriously injured or worse, we’ll wish there had been more signs, too.

Source: A mass bomb threat against Jews? Who could have seen that coming?

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Adam Pankratz: Wokeness is deservedly crashing. Let’s be careful about retribution

2024/08/24 Leave a comment

Good note of caution:

…This is the fear I have harboured for a while now: that the inevitable backlash against the insane and destructive scourge of activist identity politics would arrive and, when it came, the perpetrators would discover that they were a minority and, the majority now coming for them was not in a conciliatory mood. While minorities persecuting majorities is bad (as we have seen via cancel culture), a majority persecuting a minority, whatever they may have done, has the potential to be worse.

The most vehement and vocal adherents and actors in the culture wars of the past years have done enormous damage to both institutions and individuals. They have cost people their jobs, reputations and, in some cases, their lives. It is not unnatural to want to see such bad actors harmed as they harmed others. By doing so, however, those of us who have stood against the tidal wave of woke activism which threatened society, risk becoming the beasts we fought so hard to push back. The Capital Pride debacle demonstrates the societal pendulum is swinging back, my fear is it will bludgeon indiscriminately and plunge us further into extreme societal divides.

Source: Adam Pankratz: Wokeness is deservedly crashing. Let’s be careful about retribution

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John Robson: The progressive backlash against Capital Pride is something to behold

2024/08/23 Leave a comment

Of note:

When even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau thinks your Pride event is too aggressively weird and disruptive, it’s probably time to reconsider. Instead, Ottawa’s Capital Pride doubled down on its berserk anti-Israeli views, because ideas have consequences and bad ideas have terrible ones.

The Liberal Party of Canada is just the latest outfit to pull out of the sort of event it normally can’t get enough of. Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe is gone, plus the U.S. Embassy, Ottawa-Carleton District School Board (OCDSB), Public Service Pride Network, University of Ottawa, Ottawa Hospital, Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) and more. Which isn’t exactly like having the Southern Baptists or Sons of Thor give it a pass.

Indeed, when the Toronto Sun reported that “CHEO CEO Alex Munter said they wouldn’t take part” because some hospital staff and citizens “no longer feel safe or welcome,” I had to check whether “they” was just Munter. (No, it’s CHEO generally.) And Trudeau is such a Pride enthusiast, the Liberals are organizing a counter-event “to celebrate Ottawa’s 2SLGBTQI+ communities.”

Yes, plural. All have won and all must have communities. And the OCDSB puts up so many Pride flags, there’s barely room for a times table. So what’s going on?

It’s a seismic tremor along an ominous fault line in modern progressivism. The trigger was an Aug. 6 Capital Pride statement saying:

“Part of the growing Islamophobic sentiment we are witnessing is fuelled by the pink-washing of the war in Gaza and racist notions that all Palestinians are homophobic and transphobic. By portraying itself as a protector of the rights of queer and trans people in the Middle East, Israel seeks to draw attention away from its abhorrent human rights abuses against Palestinians. We refuse to be complicit in this violence.”

It’s provocatively, transgressively false. Israel is “portraying” itself as a haven through the devious scheme, typical of the Elders of Zion, of being one. And this “growing Islamophobic sentiment” has nothing to do with Israel respecting human rights and much to do with Hamas and its supporters here and abroad backing genocidal brutality.

The “pink-washing” indictment is hysterically and mendaciously anti-Israel. Capital Pride offers a perfunctory condemnation of Hamas atrocities before going full Henry Ford about Israel’s slaughter, dehumanization, “flagrant violation of international law” and “plausible risk of genocide.” But such demented one-sidedness is driven by a deeper, odious hostility to the people whose historic homeland includes Jerusalem.

The Jewish Federation of Ottawa, after kowtowing to “safe and inclusive,” frankly denounced Capital Pride’s “recent antisemitic statement.” And there’s the nub.

The urge to subvert, to transvalue values, cannot stop with odd hairstyles and lifestyles. It must reach into the depths of morality, and I mean the depths. Thus Capital Pride ranted, “We wish to reaffirm our commitment to solidarity as the core principle guiding our work.” But solidarity with whom? Evidently the whole dang decolonizing family, even the Muslim Brotherhood. How can you not?

Following such dangerous logic part way, the boycotters also babble about inclusion. The Ottawa Hospital said that, “Inclusivity and supporting all communities we serve is very important to us,” while Munter objected that some people “no longer feel safe or welcome.” But surely some shouldn’t feel welcome. The Klan, say. Or Hamas. Such touchy-feely inclusionism promotes unilateral mental disarmament.

Or worse. After the Sun asked Capital Pride about a sermon at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which was pointedly constructed where Islamists deny the Temple of Solomon ever stood, calling homosexuality an “abomination,” demanding a Schwulenrein Palestine including Jerusalem and objecting to men and women attending college together, it issued a new statement, “We reject any attempts to marginalize religious and cultural minority groups from the broader Pride movement.” Even death-to-Jews ones, consistently if ominously.

Wokeness may start as a trendy virtue-signalling wrapping you expect to don and doff like the rebellious calf’s leather jacket in that “Far Side” cartoon. But as Queen’s history Professor Don Akenson said, people have small ideas but “big ideas have people.” And if you’re committed to “subversion,” transvaluing all values and making others uncomfortable, you start with blue hair and a rainbow and end with a burqa and inverted red triangle.

The chickens-for-KFC paradox of queer militants supporting Hamas militants is part of the thrill. And this slippery slope is especially vertiginous if officialdom is sliding, too. If every government email lists pronouns, art galleries duct-tape bananas, the Olympics turn the Last Supper into the “Rocky Horror Picture Show” and politicians trample free speech to fight “hate,” how do you shock the bourgeoisie sufficiently that politicians recoil instead of leaning in for a selfie?

Well, respectable progressives still draw the line at blatant antisemitism. But sufficiently radical immigration policy and generalized postmodernism may erase even that boundary.

So I applaud those boycotting this transgressively transgressive event. But please check your assumptions because they’re not safe or inclusive.

Source: John Robson: The progressive backlash against Capital Pride is something to behold

Filed under LGBTQ, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Meeting between Trudeau and Muslim leaders in Quebec called off after many refuse to attend

2024/08/23 Leave a comment

Of note (counterproductive IMO):

A meeting between Muslim leaders in Quebec and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau planned for this afternoon north of Montreal — weeks ahead of a critical byelection in the city — was cancelled after many of those invited refused to attend, CBC News has learned.

“Many members of our community continue to feel angry and frustrated with a government that in their view simply hasn’t operated with integrity in relation to what is happening in Gaza, or in addressing the steep rise of Islamophobia in Canada,” the National Council of Canadian Muslims told CBC News in a media statement.

“While our community is not a monolith, this sentiment is widespread.”

It’s not clear how many people were invited to the event but the NCCM said “many members” who were invited, including “leaders and imams, declined to meet.”

Invitations were issued verbally by the office of Fayçal El-Khoury, the MP for Laval-les-Iles, according to two members of the Quebec Muslim community who spoke to CBC News….

Source: Meeting between Trudeau and Muslim leaders in Quebec called off after many refuse to attend

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Jesse Kline: The Canadian terrorist supporter who Iran loves

2024/08/23 Leave a comment

Indeed. And shameful:

There are some awards that should give recipients pause and make them reconsider their life choices. Like receiving a Razzie Award for worst actor, a Grand Cross of the German Eagle from the Nazis or a human rights award from the Islamic Republic of Iran. But for Canadian terror apologist Charlotte Kates, the Iranian regime’s recognition of her anti-Israel campaign is considered a badge of honour.

Kates is the international co-ordinator of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, a registered Canadian non-profit that was founded by members of, and is closely associated with, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which Canada recognizes as a terrorist entity.

Samidoun is also responsible for organizing and funding many of the vile anti-Israel protests that have taken place on Canadian streets since October 7.

Readers may remember Kates as the woman who stood in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery in April, shouting “Long live October 7!” and praising the massacre in which 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, were brutally raped and murdered, and over 250 were taken into captivity, where many remain to this day.

Kates was arrested as part of a hate-crime investigation and released on the condition that she not attend any rallies, pending a court date in the fall. But that did not stop her from boarding a plane to Tehran, where she — along with five other individuals, including slain Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh — received an Islamic Human Rights Award for her “anti-Zionist activities” earlier this month.

A couple days later, Kates appeared as a guest on Iranian TV, clad in a hijab and appropriately spaced from her male host, where she blamed “Zionist organizations and political officials” for her arrest and opined about the “lie of so-called western democracy and concern for human rights.”

Iran, of course, has one of the world’s most dismal human rights records. This is the country where, in 2022, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was arrested and subsequently murdered for improperly wearing a headscarf in public. The government crackdown on the ensuing protests resulted in hundreds of deaths, tens of thousands of arrests and numerous executions….

Source: Jesse Kline: The Canadian terrorist supporter who Iran loves

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Stephens: What I Want a University President to Say About Campus Protests

2024/08/22 Leave a comment

Essential reading for some of our more “woke” institutions, academics and students. Money quote:

“It was listening to students and faculty whom we had admitted or hired for their intellectual sophistication, their capacity to understand complexity and nuance, reduce their own thinking to a handful of slogans and mantras written for them by others. It was the absence of intellectual humility and its replacement with moral certitudes.:”

…Some of you may have heard the term “institutional neutrality.” It is the belief that universities like ours should avoid taking political positions of any kind, either through investment decisions or political declarations by administrators or by academic boycotts of foreign scholars, except when the interests of the university are directly affected — like when the Supreme Court weighs in on our admissions process.

You may also have heard about the Chicago principles, which make the case for universities to embrace an almost unfettered principle of free expression as “an essential part of the university’s educational mission,” even when the speech is seen by most members of the community as “offensive, unwise, immoral or wrongheaded.”

Our university embraces both institutional neutrality and the Chicago principles. We do so not because they are ends in themselves but because they are necessary ways to cultivate the spirit of inquiry. That spirit cannot be fettered by formal or informal speech codes that might stop us from asking uncomfortable but important questions, or by university policies that preclude fruitful exchanges with scholars from other countries. At our university you will find scholars from Israel, China, Turkey, Russia and other countries whose policies you may not like; we do not hold them responsible for their governments, nor do we ask them to make political declarations as the price of belonging to our community.

But necessary isn’t sufficient. If all we accomplish by adopting the Chicago principles is that everyone gets to speak and nobody bothers to listen, those principles will have fallen short. If we embrace institutional neutrality at the topmost level while remaining indifferent to the one-sided politicization of classrooms, departments and administrative offices, we will have done little to advance the pedagogical benefits of neutrality, which is intended to broaden your exposure to the widest variety of views and ideas.

And if we permit protests that inhibit the speech of others, or set up no-go zones for Jewish students, or make it difficult to study in the library or pay attention in class, we may have upheld the right to speak in the abstract while stripping it of its underlying purpose. The point of free speech is to open discussion, not to shut it down. It’s to engage with our opponents, not to shut them out. It’s to introduce fresh perspectives, not to declare every perspective but our own to be beyond the moral pale.

I’d like to add a personal note as a Jew. Many people objected to last year’s protests, with their chants of “from the river to the sea,” as antisemitic. I find that calling for the elimination of Israel — indeed, of any state — is inherently repugnant, since it would almost inevitably entail an almost unimaginable level of violence, dispossession and destruction.

But antisemitism is not what I found chiefly offensive about the protests. I accept that most of the protesters are not antisemitic, or at least don’t think of themselves that way.

What bothered me, rather, was watching members of our community turn off their critical faculties. It was listening to students and faculty whom we had admitted or hired for their intellectual sophistication, their capacity to understand complexity and nuance, reduce their own thinking to a handful of slogans and mantras written for them by others. It was the absence of intellectual humility and its replacement with moral certitudes. It was the substitution of serious political thought with propaganda. It was the refusal to engage with difference and criticism in any way except denunciation and moral bullying.

In short, the way in which these protests unfolded was an insult to the spirit of inquiry that this university has an institutional responsibility to protect and champion. So does this mean we will brook no form of protest? Of course not. But we do expect that protests, so long as they happen on our campus, on our property, conform with the aims of education as we see them.

That means, at a minimum, that we will enforce clearly established “time, place and manner” restrictions, so that the rights of those who protest are never allowed to impinge on the rights of those who don’t. It also means we will invest in serious programming about the Mideast conflict, including by inviting Israeli and Palestinian scholars to campus and hosting moderated debates where you can cheer your own political side but must at least listen to the other. Our goal is never to make you think one way or the other. It’s to make you think, period.

The spirit of protest will always have a place here, as it must in every free society. Our job is to harness it to the task of inquiry so that knowledge may continue to grow, and human life may be enriched.

Source: What I Want a University President to Say About Campus Protests


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Australia: Modernised Multicultural Grants Program

2024/08/17 Leave a comment

Announcement by the Albanese government. Interesting, that Australia provides core funding support as well as support for non-religious training for faith leaders:

The Australian Government commits to supporting a stronger multicultural Australia through the Modernised Multicultural Grants Program.

This program will:

  • give more consistent and long term funding to multicultural organisations,
  • foster more certainty and sustainability for multicultural organisations, and
  • support longer-term initiatives and lasting results.

The funding will support organisations to:

  • hold local events,
  • celebrate festivals,
  • build and deliver support programs,
  • improve amenities,
  • build facilities, and
  • strengthen their ability to serve both members of their own community and the broader society.

This program will give funding through four separate streams:

  • Infrastructure for Multicultural Organisations
  • Multicultural Grass Roots Initiatives
  • Multicultural Peak Body Funding
  • Faith Leaders Training

These opportunities are currently under development. For more information on when these grant rounds open, including how to apply for these opportunities, see the Australian Government’s grants information system, GrantConnect.

You can subscribe to the Community Grants Hub mailing list to get notifications of new grant opportunities as they become available.

Infrastructure for Multicultural Organisations

This opportunity will fund grants of up to $20 million over 3 years from 2025-26. You can apply for this round in October 2024.

Successful projects will include construction, upgrade or extension of infrastructure that provides demonstrated benefits to multicultural communities. For example:

  • community hubs and centres
  • museums, libraries and art spaces
  • indoor and outdoor amenities, like food preparation areas, dining spaces, bathrooms, play equipment and barbecue facilities
  • meeting and conference facilities
  • stages, auditoriums and spaces to encourage performing arts
  • spaces for sporting and physical activities.

To be eligible to apply, your project must be investment ready (or ‘shovel ready’), meaning construction can begin within 12 weeks of executing your grant agreement. This means you will have:

  • regulatory and/or development approvals,
  • evidence of experience in delivering similar sized projects or have engaged a third party with relevant experience,
  • evidence of your co-contribution from another source (for example state government funding) or your cash contribution to the project,
  • a detailed project proposal, including project plans (designs), timelines and procurement process,
  • detailed budget including quotes and cost benefit analysis,
  • detailed risk management plan, and
  • evidence that you either own the land/infrastructure being built/upgraded upon, or that you have the landowner’s permission to use the land/infrastructure.

Multicultural Grassroots Initiatives

Organisations will be able to apply for grants of up to $100,000 over 2 years from 2024-25 for:

  • Multicultural celebrations, such as festivals and events,
  • Multicultural amenities, such as building upgrades, furnishings or equipment, or
  • Intercultural connections, such as intercultural sports programs or art projects.

You can apply for this round in November 2024.

Multicultural Peak Body Funding

Multicultural peak bodies and community organisations will be able to apply for 4 years of funding of up to $400,000 per year. This will allow them to continue to play a pivotal role in strengthening Australia’s multicultural capacity.

You can apply for this round in December 2024.

Faith Leaders Training

This grant opportunity will provide up to $500,000 per year, over 4 years,  from 2024-25 for organisations to develop and deliver non religious training courses to faith leaders and those in pastoral roles in faith organisations.​

You can apply for this round in December 2024.

Source: Modernised Multicultural Grants Program

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