Liberal government’s new public appointment process fails to improve system, says Conacher

2016/06/07 Leave a comment

Like many such changes, the proof will only become apparent after a few years, when over 50 percent of GiC positions have been renewed or replaced.

From my perspective, the application of the diversity and inclusion agenda to appointments, hopefully accompanied by annual reporting, will help judge whether Duff Conacher or Alex Marland are correct in their initial assessments.

My take, given my focus on diversity issues, is that we will see an increase in women, visible minorities and indigenous peoples, along with other aspects of diversity, although the “values” of appointments will be largely aligned to the Liberals, just as the previous appointee values were aligned to the Conservatives.

For the baseline of current GiC appointments, see my article, Governor in Council Appointments – 2016 Baseline, or my book, “Because it’s 2015 …” Implementing Diversity and Inclusion, available as a free download (iPad/Mac version (iBooks), Windows (PDF) Version):

“The Conservatives, for most appointments, put an ad up on that website, sometimes put an ad in a newspaper, usually had a headhunter firm, for lack of a better term, do the search for candidates … the Conservatives kept on claiming ‘we’re doing this new way of appointments,’ but the key is the headhunting firm or whoever did the search would just put a list that was a completely advisory list to cabinet and cabinet or the prime minister could choose whomever they wanted,” said Mr. Conacher.

On Feb. 25, 2016, the Liberals quietly announced a new approach to governor in council appointments, which will “apply to the majority of non-judicial appointments, and will make hundreds of part-time positions subject to a formal selection process for the first time.”

“We are committed to raising the bar on openness and transparency in government to make sure that it remains focused on serving Canadians as effectively and efficiently as possible. Government must serve the public interest, and remain accountable to Canadians,” reads a quote from Mr. Trudeau on the release (there is no corresponding event or actual in-person announcement indicated).

As indicated online, the “new approach will” require all GIC opportunities to be advertised online, as well as in the Canada Gazette, and GIC candidates will complete an online profile of their personal background (including language and identity group) in order to try to ensure diversity in appointments.

“Additional online and/or print media may be used in some cases,” reads the website. “Each rigorous selection process will be based on advertised selection criteria developed for the position, and assessment of candidates against the criteria,” it reads, adding this assessment is then provided to the minister responsible.

Members of these selection committee “will be chosen to represent the interests of those who are responsible for decision-making on appointments (the minister, the prime minister), as well as individuals who bring a perspective on the specific interests and needs of the organization,” reads the frequently asked questions section.

The February release indicates this “will be” the new process for GIC appointments, and “the Governor in Council appointment process does not require the approval of Parliament,” said PMO press secretary Cameron Ahmad, when asked what’s required to formalize the new process posted online.

“The process is currently being implemented and applies to Governor in Council appointments. It was made public in February,” he said, adding “the Privy Council Office supports the prime minister with respect to governor in council appointments” when asked which department drafted the new process.

The Liberal government’s new “rigorous approach to appointments is based on the principals of open, transparent and merit-based selection processes that will support ministers in making appointment recommendations for positions in their portfolio,” said Mr. Ahmad, when asked why ultimate discretion to recommend to the GG lies with cabinet and the PM.

“The new approach raises the bar on openness and transparency in government and supports accountability to Canadians,” his response continued.

Mr. Conacher said the Liberal government’s new GIC process is ultimately “no different than what the Conservatives did,” and by allowing ministers or the PM to ignore selection committee recommendations it’s “maintained the patronage crony system.” He said he thinks the Liberals are reluctant to fully take decisions out of the hands of government because “the Liberals have a whole bunch of people who volunteered for 10 years while they lost three elections and some of those people want a reward.”

“This is one of the greatest areas of cabinet power,” said Mr. Conacher.

Mr. Conacher said instead, there should be a new process introduced federally similar to Ontario’s judicial appointments committee which has 13 members, six of whom are members of the public—though he said the “flaw” is seven members are from the ruling party. Mr. Conacher said with a minority of members from the ruling party and a majority from opposition parties, or require membership to be approved by all House leaders. This committee would “come up with a short list” of candidates and then cabinet would “have to choose from the short list.”

As well, he said all positions should be advertised widely online, including on popular public job sites (like Monster Jobs, for example).

Alex Marland, associate professor of politics at Memorial University, said if the “composition of the group of people making the [GIC appointment] recommendations have deep Liberal connections” it’s hard to “put a lot of faith that this is any more than window dressing.” But he also said he doesn’t worry about cabinet or the PM having discretion over such appointments.

“I actually think that’s necessary, because ultimately cabinet is accountable to Parliament, and ultimately cabinet has to run the government, so how could the government function if somebody is being recommended to a position and cabinet is bound to appoint someone who they realize the can’t possibly work with or who will undermine what they’re trying to do,” said Prof. Marland.

Prof. Marland said more transparency is good, and the fact that the process is publicly available “does reduce the possibility” for cronyism and at the end of the day, “you have to trust that these groups take their jobs seriously and will actually make recommendations that they believe are the right ones.”

The Liberals have also committed to review the judicial appointment process and in an email response to questions from The Hill Times, including on timing, Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould said she “will work with interested stakeholders, including the judiciary, and Canadians on these appointments.”

“In the interim, our Government is moving forward on measures that will facilitate appointments to fill highly pressing judicial vacancies as soon as possible,” reads her response. There are currently about 46 vacant seats on the benches of federally appointed superior courts across Canada.

As well, back in December, the Liberals announced the creation of a new Senate appointment process with the Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments.

Source: Liberal government’s new public appointment process fails to improve system, says Conacher |

Filed under Government, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , , ,

Ontario children’s aid societies agree to collect race data

2016/06/07 Leave a comment

Overdue.

But data should be used not only to identify bias and ensure consistent treatment but also by communities to discuss aspects that may be internal:

Children’s aid societies in Ontario have agreed to collect data on the race of children and families they serve, a move that comes after mounting outrage about the high number of black and aboriginal kids in care.

Mary Ballantyne, CEO of the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies, says societies will have a “consistent approach” in place within a year to gather the race-based data.

“We need to have this data,” Ballantyne said. “It will help us figure out what kinds of services need to be provided to what kinds of kids.”

The goal is to ensure that families and children served across the province are being treated equitably, she added. “It is a top priority.”

Ballantyne vowed to make the province-wide race data public as soon as it is collected and analyzed.

The societies are making the commitment after an ongoing Star investigation found that 42 per cent of children and youth in the care of the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto have at least one parent who is black. Only 8 per cent of the city’s under-18 population is black.

Black community leaders have complained for years that their children are taken into care in disproportionate numbers. They’ve been pushing the government to order the collection of race-based data, arguing that the child protection system is biased against black families.

Everton Gordon, interim CEO of the Jamaican Canadian Association, called the societies’ commitment to collect race-based data a step in the right direction. He insists, however, that the statistics be used to trigger programs and reforms that will reduce the number of black kids in care.

“It’s more than just a numbers game,” Gordon said in an interview. “It speaks to a system that has embedded biases that produce disproportionality for different marginalized groups.”

Source: Ontario children’s aid societies agree to collect race data | Toronto Star

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Muslims Are Just The Latest In History Of Scapegoats, Author Says

2016/06/07 Leave a comment

All too true, similar to Canadian experience. Good interesting interview with Ardalan Iftikhar, author of Scapegoat:

IFTIKHAR: Generally speaking, islamophobia has come to mean a hatred of anything related to Islam and Muslims. And it’s important to keep in mind that if you look at the civil rights history of the United States, every minority group in America has been scapegoats. And tomorrow, it’ll be somebody else. And so that’s the key thing here, is that, you know, when you look at the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, it’s not only the Muslim ban that he’s called for. He’s called for building a wall against Latinos and said disparaging remarks against African-Americans.

The point here is that we as Americans need to focus on the things that bring us together as Americans and not things that separate us. And I feel like – as though we have always had scapegoats in the past. We have scapegoats currently. And I believe that Islam and Muslims are the current scapegoats in America today.

MARTIN: Well, in fact, in the book you write about Germans during World War I who were targets of harassment. You said at the time that they were actually the largest minority group in the United States – that German-language newspapers were shut down, German-American religious services were disrupted. You write that a German immigrant in Illinois was actually lynched after having been accused of stealing dynamite. And then of course, during World War II, the internment of the Japanese, which is something that a lot of people are familiar with. Why do you think that is?

IFTIKHAR: Well, I think that as an American society, we’ve always needed a proverbial bogeyman. I think politicians have used bogeymen to further their own political agendas, whether it’s Catholics that were coming across the pond at the turn of the 20th century to German-Americans to Japanese-Americans to anti-Semitism to Jim Crow and African-American – the African-American civil rights movement. And I think that now, in the post-9/11 civil rights era that we live in, I believe that Islam and Muslims are being used as a scapegoat. And I think that many politicians are trying to score cheap political points, and I think that Donald Trump is a perfect example of that.

MARTIN: Now I want to talk about the second part of the title of the book, though, which is that it helps our enemies and threatens our freedoms. That’s what you say islamophobia does. I mean, the premise of your book is that there is a broader, corrosive effect on the society if that mentality is maintained. Tell me why you think that.

IFTIKHAR: Well, because as I look at American history, right? Because even though the fill-in-the-blanks is Muslims today, tomorrow it could be anyone else. I mean, when the USA Patriot Act came out in 2001, you know, this was a 348-page document that trumped 50 federal laws. And it wasn’t just targeted at brown Muslims who were suspected of terrorism. This allows the federal government to come in and, without a warrant, get all of your information without even notifying you, going to college registrars, getting all their information. I mean, it affects everybody.

You know, political rhetoric leads to laws. And that’s important to keep in mind, is that again, you know, the internment camps of World War II didn’t come out of a vacuum. You had people – President Roosevelt’s general, who was the head of Pacific Command, James DeWitt, was quoted in Congress as saying once a Jap, always a Jap. I mean, this sort of anti-Japanese rhetoric was actually what led to the internment camps.

And that’s the thing, is that, you know, we can’t just see this as, you know, ha ha, this is just kind of silly political rhetoric that’s coming out. This could – you know, if somebody – if Donald Trump comes out tomorrow and says, you know, we should put Muslims in internment camps – well, you know, we’ve had them in the past. Who’s to say that we can’t have them again in the future?

Source: Muslims Are Just The Latest In History Of Scapegoats, Author Says : NPR

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

The Times’ Idea of Lagging Diversity | commentary

2016/06/07 Leave a comment

Even though I value the reporting and commentary of the New York Times, valid to point out the contradiction:

In today’s New York Times, there is a front-page article on the new Chairman of Carnegie Hall, Robert F. Smith. Mr. Smith, who made his fortune in software, ranks #268 on the Forbes 400 list, is worth $2.5 billion, and is the country’s richest African-American after Oprah Winfrey.

The Times noted with characteristic snooty disapproval that, with his new appointment, Smith “became the first African-American to hold the post at a time when diversity at leading cultural organizations lags — a recent survey of New York’s cultural institutions found that nearly 78 percent of their board members were white.”

Given the fact that board members of major cultural institutions such as concert halls and museums are expected, along with performing their duties, to write major checks every year, 78 percent white doesn’t seem so disproportionate. However much racial diversity has improved in most of American life, the very, very rich are still mostly white. That can’t be changed by government fiat (although I hate to give the Obama administration any bright ideas). It will take a couple of generations before the Forbes 400 List “looks like America.”

I wondered what percentage of the New York Times editorial board was white, but have found its membership strangely hard to track down on the Internet (the Wall Street Journal editorial board is here). So I looked up the membership of the New York Times Board of Directors instead. It’s over 91 percent white. The top executive team is likewise more than 91 percent white.

As usual with the Times, it seems, it’s do as we say not as we do.

Source: The Times’ Idea of Lagging Diversity | commentary

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Federal study disputes claim diaspora communities breed extremists

2016/06/06 Leave a comment

The latest study showing that diaspora communities largely play an integrating role, similar to the Mosaic Institute study on imported conflicts (see Unpacking conflict: “We don’t import conflict. But we do import trauma.”):

Canada’s immigrant communities are not breeding grounds for terrorists, as some would argue, but should be enlisted to reduce any violent radicalization in their midst, says a newly released report.

The research, ordered by the Harper government in 2014, appears to repudiate Conservative measures that alienated Muslim communities in the months before last year’s election.

The authors examined four diaspora communities in Canada — Afghan, Somali, Syrian and Tamil — and found them to be willing allies for rooting out extremism among their often young and isolated members.

“More resilient diaspora communities represent the best line of defence against violent extremism,” says the March 30 report, obtained by CBC News under the Access to Information Act.

“Diasporas are not a threat, as some of the mainstream discourse on counterterrorism has often implied, but rather Canada’s most valued asset in the fight against terrorism.”

The authors found a mutual distrust between these communities and security agencies, driven partly by news media and academics who have “framed diaspora communities as partly complicit in terrorist activity, a source of threat for host countries like Canada.”

“It has fostered suspicion and even discrimination against certain diaspora groups.”

The research says security agencies such as the RCMP and CSIS need to build trust, especially among Muslim groups in Canada who can often alert police to potential terror activity.

“Dispelling Islamophobia and other forms of discrimination should be a centrepiece of any community engagement strategy surrounding anti-radicalization, as it has fuelled distrust of the state and wider Canadian society in Muslim diaspora communities.”

Helps restore balance

The $180,000 study for Public Safety Canada was carried out over a year by the Kitchener, Ont.-based Security Governance Group, a private consultant firm.

Former Canadian Security Intelligence Service analyst Phil Gurski, a specialist in homegrown radicalization, applauded the findings, saying they can help restore the balance between “hard security” — surveillance, arrests and charges — and “soft security,” or building trust within ethnic communities.

“We had the balance fairly good a couple of years ago, and then some unfortunate things happened towards the end of the Harper government that kind of maligned the trust we had built with communities and put us back a few steps,” Gurski said in an interview.

Among those setbacks was the government’s removal of Hussein Hamdani in April 2015 from the Cross Cultural Roundtable on National Security, after a Quebec blogger alleged Hamdani harboured terrorist sympathies.

The removal resulting from “baseless allegations” was “the biggest blow to the government’s relationship with the Muslim community,” said Gurski, who was Hamdani’s colleague and friend. “It had a chilling effect.”

The incident was followed by last summer’s niqab controversy, in which the Harper government pressed to have Muslim women remove their face covering at citizenship ceremonies, and the Oct. 2 announcement by Conservatives Kellie Leitch and Chris Alexander of a “barbaric cultural practices tip line,” allowing citizens to call RCMP anonymously with allegations about their neighbours.

Not too late

Gurski, who was a CSIS officer from 2001 to 2013 and then with Public Safety until retirement last year, said it’s not too late to rebuild trust.

“The communities are willing to play ball again, despite the disappointments they had toward the end of the Harper government,” he said.

Sara Thompson, who teaches criminology at Toronto’s Ryerson University, said the report’s findings parallel her own work with the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society.

“Our findings are remarkably consistent: on the whole the communities under examination should not be viewed as ‘suspect’ but rather as important allies in efforts to prevent radicalization,” she said.

“Community-based tripwires are often activated via a concept known as ‘leakage’ — the tendency among radicalized individuals to broadcast their views and intentions to commit violent acts in advance, typically to friends, family, acquaintances and/or community members.”

Source: Federal study disputes claim diaspora communities breed extremists – Politics – CBC News

Filed under Radicalization Tagged with , , , ,

Sikh nationalist movement attempts to shed violent past

2016/06/06 Leave a comment

Interesting:

Advocates for an independent Sikh homeland say they’re looking to the future and pushing for a referendum in India within four years, but the Khalistan movement has been hit by a familiar controversy – an alleged link to extremist violence.

Hardeep Nijjar, a B.C. man who has collected signatures to have anti-Sikh violence in India in the 1980s recognized as genocide, was accused in an Indian newspaper report this week of running a “terror camp” east of Vancouver. Mr. Nijjar was also alleged to be the operational head of a group known as the Khalistan Terror Force and said to be linked to a 2007 attack on a cinema that killed six people. He denied wrongdoing and sent a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in which he said he has never supported violence.

Sikhs for Justice, a non-profit organization with headquarters in Toronto and New York for which Mr. Nijjar has volunteered, rushed to his defence and accused the Indian government of trying to discredit the push for Sikh self-determination.

The incident highlighted the trouble the Khalistan movement has had shedding its violent reputation, particularly in Canada.

Khalistan proponents were linked to extremist violence in the 1980s, most notably the Air India bombings, which killed 329 people on an airliner and two baggage handlers in Tokyo in 1985. During the subsequent trial, the Crown alleged the bombings were carried out in response to the Indian government’s raid on the Golden Temple, Sikhism’s holiest shrine, a year earlier.

Since the report involving Mr. Nijjar surfaced, the RCMP has said little about his case specifically, or about the Khalistan movement generally. But a former analyst at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service said the movement appears to have quieted down in recent years and Canadian law-enforcement agencies have shifted resources elsewhere, such as Islamist extremism.

When asked if the Khalistan movement in Canada will ever be able to move beyond its violent past, Jatinder Grewal, the director of international policy for Sikhs for Justice, said he believes so.

“This idea that India can frame this dialogue solely in the aspects of violence and terrorism is false,” Mr. Grewal, who lives in Toronto, said in an interview.

“The fact is this is a peaceful movement. We just want to hold a referendum.”

Mr. Grewal said Sikhs for Justice, which was founded in 2007, is aiming for a referendum to be held in 2020. He said his organization would like the vote to be open to residents in the northern state of Punjab – which has a Sikh majority and would become an independent state. Mr. Grewal said those who have origins in the state but have since moved elsewhere should also be able to vote.

…Phil Gurski, who worked as a strategic analyst in Canadian intelligence for more than 30 years, including 15 years with CSIS, said it’s unclear how big of a security threat the movement is at this point.

Mr. Gurski, who left CSIS in 2013 and is now the president of Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting, said there are undoubtedly fewer law-enforcement resources dedicated to Sikh extremism today than in the past.

“You put your resources where the greatest threat lies and as of today that threat lies with Islamist extremism,” he said in an interview. “It’s not rocket science that when you’re forced to deploy your resources in one direction, you’ve got to take them from somewhere else.”

Shinder Purewal, a political-science professor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, said in an interview earlier this week that while the Khalistan movement in Canada has been linked to violence in the past, there have not been such incidents of late.

Source: Sikh nationalist movement attempts to shed violent past – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization Tagged with , , ,

How Timbuktu’s Bad-Ass Librarian Got Lucky – The Daily Beast

2016/06/04 Leave a comment

Good long read on the efforts of Abdel Kader Haidara and the Ahmed Baba Institute to find and preserve rare manuscripts and a reminder of the rich historical intellectual tradition within Islam.

Islamist militants set fire to the Institute in 2014 but many manuscripts were saved and moved to more secure locations:

Nor did Haidara have second thoughts about the life that he had chosen. “I was well paid for this work. They let me do whatever I wanted, and I did it well,” he recalled three decades later. “I had my freedom. And I had a great responsibility. I had to convince people not to lie. I had to convince them to hand over their manuscripts. They gave me this responsibility with confidence, and I had to fulfill it. And when I started reading these manuscripts, I discovered amazing things, and I couldn’t leave them alone. I couldn’t stop reading.” He steeped himself in the lives of kings and savants, in the wondrous encounters of Timbuktu’s intellectuals with the city’s first Western visitors, in the divisions within Sufism over fikh, or Islamic law, and in the ethical arguments of Ahmed Baba and other polemicists.

He was particularly interested in manuscripts that contradicted Western stereotypes of Islam as a religion of intolerance—pointing with pride to Ahmed Baba’s denunciations of slavery, and to the strident correspondence between the jihadi sultan of Massina and Sheikh Ahmed Al Bakkay Al Kounti, a mid-19th-century Islamic scholar in Timbuktu known for his moderation and acceptance of Jews and Christians. As time passed he became something of a savant himself, revered by many peers in Timbuktu for his knowledge of the region’s history and religion, sought after by parents to offer their children guidance.

Source: How Timbuktu’s Bad-Ass Librarian Got Lucky – The Daily Beast

Filed under Religion Tagged with , ,

Conservatives are not bigots | Malcolm 

2016/06/03 Leave a comment

Candice Malcolm, former press secretary to Jason Kenney, and author of Losing True North: Justin Trudeau’s Assault on Canadian Citizenship, appears to remain in denial mode regarding Conservative identity politics and messaging (unlike many members at the recent convention):

If anyone looks at such policies and argues that Conservatives were targeting all Muslims, the problem isn’t the policies.

It’s their perception of them.Conservatives clearly differentiated between terrorists and peaceful Muslims.

Source: Conservatives are not bigots | Malcolm | Columnists | Opinion | Toronto Sun

Filed under Citizenship, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Unsettling U.S. Political Climate Galvanizes Muslims to Vote – The New York Times

2016/06/03 Leave a comment

Not surprising. A similar shift happened in the Canadian 2015 elections with Canadian Muslims:

In late December — after the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., and the call by Donald J. Trump, now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” — the United States Council of Muslim Organizations, a national umbrella group, announced plans to register a million voters.

“When your existence in society is in danger, you try to mobilize your community,” said the organization’s secretary general, Oussama Jammal. “You have to be part of the entire society.”

While the effort is mostly geared toward the November election, groups here have made a push to register Muslims in time for the state primary on Tuesday. Drives were held on a recent Friday at 21 mosques and Islamic centers in the Bay Area and Sacramento and at seven places in the Los Angeles area.

“Muslims are a big campaign issue, as big as the climate, the economy and immigration. We’re spoken about as if we’re not there,” said Rusha Latif, an organizer of the Rock the Muslim Vote campaign. “We want to amplify our voices.”

For organizers, the time is ripe for registration.

“It’s hard to encourage people to participate based on good things happening,” said Melissa Michelson, an author of “Mobilizing Inclusion: Transforming the Electorate Through Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns” and a professor at Menlo College. “Fear and threats are much more powerful motivators.”

As the general election approaches, Muslim organizations will pay particular attention to swing states, where “several thousand voters have the ability to tip the elections,” said Robert S. McCaw, the director of the government affairs department at the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Muslims make up about 1 percent of the United States population. A study conducted by the Institute for Social and Policy Understanding, a nonpartisan think tank, found that only 60 percent of citizens who are Muslim were registered voters, compared with at least 86 percent of Jews, Protestants and Roman Catholics.

“A lot of Muslims didn’t participate in elections because they didn’t see a lot of difference between the parties,” said Emir Sundiata Alrashid of the Lighthouse Mosque in Oakland, where a voter-registration drive was held last month. The mosque sits in a residential neighborhood near a freeway overpass.

Source: Unsettling U.S. Political Climate Galvanizes Muslims to Vote – The New York Times

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Why the election of London’s first Muslim mayor is a message of hope: Dominique Moisi

2016/06/02 Leave a comment

Tend to agree:

“I feel so proud of my city,” my interlocutor said, referring to the election of Sadiq Khan as London’s first Muslim mayor. She is Catholic, though she identifies first and foremost as British. But, like many other Londoners, she was inspired by Mr. Khan’s message of hope over fear.Mr. Khan’s election contrasts shar

“I feel so proud of my city,” my interlocutor said, referring to the election of Sadiq Khan as London’s first Muslim mayor. She is Catholic, though she identifies first and foremost as British. But, like many other Londoners, she was inspired by Mr. Khan’s message of hope over fear.

Mr. Khan’s election contrasts sharply with dynamics that seem to be at work elsewhere in the West. European populations – in Hungary and Poland, and with a close call in Austria – are falling prey to increasingly radical, openly xenophobic populism. In the United States, Donald Trump’s bombastic bigotry has made him the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

Londoners certainly had the option of intolerance. They could have voted for the Conservative candidate, Zac Goldsmith, who accused Mr. Khan of having ties with “radical Muslim figures.” The expectation that any Muslim person is linked to extremism is undeniably racist. Levelling such accusations against a Muslim running for public office has nothing to do with protecting the public interest. The purpose of such tactics is to reinforce the notion that no Muslim can be trusted to hold an important leadership position.

Many people attempt to justify this view by pointing out that the Koran makes no distinction between “what belongs to God and what belongs to Caesar.” But that implies that all Muslims behave exclusively according to the tenets of the Koran, without regard for secular law. That is simply not true.

In some cases, there are questions about how Islam’s adherents, including some of its most visible representatives, approach the subject of Islam’s role in the West. The scholar Tariq Ramadan, for example, has spoken of the rise of a “European Islam,” which anchors Islamic principles to the cultural reality of Western Europe. I fully support this notion, as long as this new Islam shares without reservation the values, beliefs and memories of Europeans, including recognition of Israel’s right to exist. (Unfortunately, when I expressed this to Mr. Ramadan in a debate years ago, he remained silent.)

The challenges that may arise when incorporating Islam into Europe’s already diverse societies do not, in any sense, mean that Muslims cannot be trusted to lead well.

Yet some, particularly in France, are now warning that Mr. Khan’s election is the first step toward a not-too-distant future in which Muslims impose Islamic law on European countries, a scenario made vivid by Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, Submission. (The book, however, can be interpreted less as a prediction of a Muslim takeover than as a criticism of French political correctness, which seems to adhere to the mantra, “Anyone but the National Front.”)

The implications of Mr. Khan’s election are likely to contradict the bigots and fear mongers. Beyond acting as a slap in the face to Europe’s populist forces, his victory will deal a blow to the Islamic State, which for the purpose of recruitment depends on young European Muslims’ feelings of humiliation, marginalization and failure.

With a Muslim as mayor of London – a great Western city, which has suffered brutal terrorist attacks – it will be that much harder for jihadis to convince potential recruits in the West that their governments and societies are seeking to repress them. If young Muslims can succeed in the West, why would they give up their lives for IS, which is already losing ground in Iraq and Syria?

Of course, Muslim success stories such as Mr. Khan’s remain too few and far between. But there is much to be gained from recognizing, publicizing and multiplying them. This would probably be easier to achieve in Britain than in France, where the absolute separation of church and state remains at the core of French republican identity.

In short, by rejecting Islamophobia and reiterating their belief in the values of an open society, Londoners have dealt a blow to Islamists. But it would be dangerous to overestimate the implications of Mr. Khan’s election.

For one thing, London is hardly representative of the entire United Kingdom, much less the rest of Europe or the West as a whole. The city is more cosmopolitan than New York, as culturally dynamic as Berlin and much more self-confident than Paris. It is exceptional in its energy and openness. (If only Londoners were to vote in the June 23 referendum, they would most likely choose to remain in the European Union, despite its flaws.)

For another, London’s openness and confidence is dependent, at least partly, on economic growth and prosperity. After all, it is far easier to share a large and growing pie. The stereotypical “Polish plumber” who contributed to the beautification of London starting in the early 1990s was an economic asset, never a threat, and at least indirectly paved the way for workers from other countries and cultures.

Nonetheless, the openness of Londoners – especially at a time when so many of their Western counterparts are being tempted by bigotry – is worthy of celebration. Rather than answering fear with more fear, they elected the better candidate, regardless of religion. That is how it should be.

Source: Why the election of London’s first Muslim mayor is a message of hope – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →