Hard Line on Immigration Resonates Less With Young Republicans, Survey Shows – The New York Times

2016/03/30 Leave a comment

Another example of the generation divide:

Young Republicans are much more likely to have favorable views of immigration and to support a path to citizenship for immigrants in the United States illegally than are older Republican voters, according to a survey published on Tuesday by the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan research group. The divide could mean trouble in the general election for either of the two leading Republican candidates, Donald J. Trump and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who have called for mass deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants.

In the survey, 63 percent of Republicans under 30 said they supported giving those immigrants a chance to become citizens if they met certain requirements. Only 20 percent of young Republicans said they would identify and deport them. By contrast, about a third — 34 percent — of Republicans age 65 and over favored deportation, and less than half — 47 percent — said they supported a pathway to citizenship for those immigrants.

A third option, allowing the immigrants to become permanent legal residents but not citizens, was not supported by more than 15 percent of either group.

The institute’s survey is unusual because of the size and duration of its sample. The report is based on 42,586 telephone interviews conducted in English and Spanish from April 29, 2015, to Jan. 7, 2016. The margin of error is plus or minus one point.

Mr. Trump’s pledges to expel illegal immigrants and to build a wall along the border with Mexico consistently draw cheers at his rallies. Mr. Cruz has followed Mr. Trump and hardened his position, saying he would deport illegal immigrants and would not allow them to return.

In general, Republicans’ views of foreign newcomers are negative, the survey suggests, with 53 percent saying that recent immigration “threatens traditional American customs and values,” while only about a third — 32 percent — say immigrants “strengthen American society.” Among conservative Republicans, 58 percent think immigration is bad for the country.

But 51 percent of young Republicans say immigrants make the country stronger.

Source: Hard Line on Immigration Resonates Less With Young Republicans, Survey Shows – First Draft. Political News, Now. – The New York Times

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In a highly competitive world, is diversity Canada’s advantage? Momani and Stirk

2016/03/29 Leave a comment

Op-ed by Bessma Momani and Jill Stirk on their research supported by the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation on the business benefits of multiculturalism or pluralism (disclosure: I have been discussing with them how some of my data from my research and book Multiculturalism in Canada: Evidence and Anecdote could assist their work):

Research shows that diverse organizations make better decisions, and companies with diverse leadership see rewards in their bottom line. A 2015 study by McKinsey and Co., for example, shows that “companies in the top quartile for gender, racial and ethnic diversity are more likely to have financial returns above their national industry medians.” A recent study by the Peterson Institute found that 22,000 companies whose executive management was gender-diverse realized 6-per-cent higher corporate earnings.

Business leaders, both at home and abroad, tell us that the country’s diverse work force makes Canada an attractive partner for investment and trade. As one executive of a high-tech company noted, “I want my team to be diverse, and I know I can get that in Canada.” Research from the Conference Board of Canada shows that businesses operated by immigrant entrepreneurs are twice as likely to export outside Canada and the United States, and not necessarily to their country or region of origin.

But despite all this anecdote and evidence, it’s not clear that business leaders, even in today’s knowledge-based economy, truly embrace diversity of thought, experience, gender and ethno-cultural background as a key input into an innovative service or product. They understand that they must invest in science and technology, and generate ideas to create value. But is Canada taking full advantage of its rich diversity? Are we leveraging our globally connected citizens to the same extent as India, Australia or Britain?

Even though it’s increasingly clear that pluralistic societies are a magnet for talent and investment, governments too often focus on reinforcing borders or on protecting local monopolies, while businesses fail to see the opportunities that come with diverse international experience. Going forward, a national strategy to realize the benefits of diversity must involve a closer look at policies on labour mobility, taxation, fast-track visas for specialized needs, international research collaboration, foreign credential recognition and bridging, and ways to expand young Canadians’ opportunities to study and work abroad so they can gain vital international experience and build global connections.

With support from the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, we are taking an in-depth look at the links between pluralism and economic prosperity. Together with our partners, we are generating new academic research and consulting with business leaders, industry associations, universities and civic organizations to compile a comprehensive study of how diversity can be leveraged for greater economic advantage. We are documenting how Canadians are contributing to and benefiting from global connections, and how the growing Canadian diaspora – three million people living and working abroad – contribute to our role in an interconnected global economy.

Now, more than ever, as the discussion of global migration and diversity are increasingly polarized and scrutinized, it’s time to demonstrate the economic value of having a pluralist society. A diverse work force could be the comparative advantage for us to capitalize on in a highly competitive but slow-growing global economy.

Source: In a highly competitive world, is diversity Canada’s advantage? – The Globe and Mail

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Was Mother Teresa Really ‘Saintly’? – The Daily Beast

2016/03/29 Leave a comment

One of the counterpoints:

So Mother Teresa’s friendship was for sale—but that wasn’t the worst that could be said about her. Hitchens’s hostility to religion could cross over into hysteria, even idiocy: he once reproduced in print the urban legend that Orthodox Jews have sex through a hole in a sheet, so that their bodies don’t touch. But he got something essentially right about Mother Teresa’s theology when he noted that she wanted those in her care to suffer. Why else did she—despite the unaudited millions that her order brings in donations—provide her homes’ dying residents with thin cots, instead of proper hospital beds? Why did she deny them adequate narcotic pain relief? And why did she treat their pain as a beautiful thing? Because she believed that suffering brought the sick closer to Jesus Christ.

“The point,” Hitchens wrote, after adducing careful evidence, “is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection. Mother Teresa (who herself, it should be noted, has checked into some of the finest and costliest clinics and hospitals in the West during her bouts with heart trouble and old age) once gave this game away in a filmed interview.” Describing a person in the last agonies of cancer, she “told the camera what she told this terminal patient: ‘You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.’ Unconscious of the account to which this irony might be charged, she then told of the sufferer’s reply: ‘Then please tell him to stop kissing me.’”

The Catholic Church, of course, does not canonize people for their moral perfection. For Catholics, all human beings are fallen and sinful in nature; canonized saints are not perfect beings but simply people who led lives worthy enough to receive special recognition in their afterlives (as a technical matter, saints are those whose names can be invoked in the liturgy). So Mother Teresa could be as bad as Hitchens said she was, and yet in relevant ways good enough to deserve sainthood. And therein lies a problem. For while the Church never claimed that saints are necessarily super-human, our popular perception of saints requires them to be, and so we develop historical amnesia about who they really were.

Some of the Catholic saints, even some of the real biggies, were perfectly dreadful. For starters, a startling number were anti-Semites. “How dare Christians have the slightest intercourse with Jews, those most miserable of all men,” asked St. John Chrysostom, the fourth-century church father. In Jesus’ time, the Jews’ “evil ways corrupted the morals of the people,” according to St. Thomas Aquinas. “Jews are slayers of the Lord, murderers of the prophets,” said St. Gregory of Nyssa. If it seems bit unfair to hold men ancient and medieval to our modern ideals of toleration—after all, to be a European Christian was, once upon a time, to be taught do despise Jews—then consider all the saints who were bloody crusaders, or cruel catechizers of unwilling native peoples. One begins to see that there’s something unnerving about the whole category. 

Of course, Wolf, the philosopher, would immediately recognize that Catholic saints were not supposed to be moral saints, not as she understands the term. The Catholic Church has historically looked to canonize people of grandeur—institution builders, martyrs, self-flagellators, mystics, and of course miracle workers—but not always men and women of particular kindness or generosity. Contemporary Americans have tacked on a third expectation of saints, the Winfrey expectation, that they publicly perform warmth and love, if possible after encountering, in their own lives, great suffering. By brushing against evil—Mother Teresa in the Calcutta slums, Wiesel in the Holocaust, Winfrey and Angelou in their own childhood abuse—and then emerging as beacons of love and optimism, they shore up our wishes for the perfectibility of the world.

It is our shortsighted, and very modern error, that we want Mother Teresa to be a saint by all these definitions. She was a shrewd operator, one of the great institution builders of our time. And she was a kind of witness to depravity. But she wasn’t always kind, and only by suspending our honest judgment could we find her easy to love. 

Source: Was Mother Teresa Really ‘Saintly’? – The Daily Beast

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ICYMI – Douglas Todd: The dangers of a ‘postnational’ Canada

2016/03/29 Leave a comment

Douglas Todd wades into the post-nationalist debate and framing Canada in terms of common values, as does PM Trudeau, rather than on an ethnic basis.

Before digging further into the influences behind our over-heated housing markets, however, I’ll make a case for healthy nationalism.

Avoid extremes

The first thing to keep in mind is to not judge nationalism by its extremes.

As G.K. Chesterton once said, condemning nationalism because it can lead to war is like condemning love because it can lead to murder.

In recent years many regions have developed generally positive forms of nationalism, Scotland, the Czech Republic, the U.S., Argentina, Japan, Sweden to name a few.

Healthy nationalism encourages diverse people to cooperate.

“Patriotism is what makes us behave unselfishly. It is why we pay taxes to support strangers, why we accept election results when we voted for the loser, why we obey laws with which we disagree,” writes Daniel Hannan, author of Inventing Freedom.

“A functioning state requires broad consensus on what constitutes the first-person plural. Take that sense away, you get Syria or Iraq or Ukraine or — well, pretty much any war zone you can name.”

Though Canada’s particular style of nationalism is fluid and not simple to define, it’s part of what makes the country attractive to immigrants, who often arrive from dysfunctional regions torn by corruption and cynicism about national officials.

Many immigrants seem to realize that it’s not normally nationalism that foments catastrophic division, it’s religion, race or tribalism.

In contrast, some of the world’s most economically successful and egalitarian countries have a sense of mutual trust and appreciation for good government that is in part based on the glue of nationalism.

People in proud Nordic countries, for instance, often decorate even their birthday cakes with their national flags. At the same time Nordic nations are generous to their disadvantaged and in distributing foreign aid.

Michael McDonald, former head of the University of B.C.’s Centre for Applied Ethics, thinks Trudeau’s belief that Canada is the world’s first “postnational state” emerges out of his concern that it’s dangerous to “affirm a dominant culture that suppresses and marginalizes those outside the mainstream.”

But even though the ethics professor believes it’s important to protect minorities, he isn’t prepared to overlook the value of nationalism.

McDonald believes being Canadian is like being a member of a community, or a big family.

“Some are born into the family and others are adopted. There is a shared family history — interpreted in diverse ways,” McDonald says.

“Not everyone is happy being in the family. Some think being a family member is important and others do not. But we are shaped by our families, and we shape ourselves within and sometimes against our families. So also with our country.”

Transnationalist dangers

Embracing McDonald’s view that Canada is a giant, unruly but somewhat bonded family, I’d suggest Trudeau contradicts himself, or is at least being naive, when he argues Canada is a postnational state.

On one hand Trudeau claims Canada has no “core identity.” On the other hand he says the Canadian identity is quite coherent — we all share the values of “openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice.”

Can it be both ways?

Most Canadians don’t think so. Regardless of what Trudeau told the New York Times, a recent Angus Reid Institute poll confirmed what many Canadians judge to be common sense: 75 per cent of residents believe there is a “unique Canadian culture.”

Less a contradiction than a refinement of what is common to Canadians (imperfectly, of course).

Source: Douglas Todd: The dangers of a ‘postnational’ Canada

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No longer buried: Rio’s slave past unearthed at Valongo Wharf during Olympic renovations

2016/03/28 Leave a comment

One of the likely enduring legacies of the Rio Olympics, a greater understanding of the past:

In an abandoned train depot near Rio de Janeiro’s derelict port area are stacked dozens of black plastic boxes. Two young researchers are sorting through their contents. Inside one box: a ceramic pipe. Inside another: a plate used in a traditional religious ceremony.

All of the objects belonged to former slaves and most of these finds wouldn’t have been discovered if it hadn’t been for work related to the Olympics.

In 2011, the city of Rio embarked on an extensive project to rejuvenate the long-neglected port area. Among the planned projects: the Museum of Tomorrow, an Olympic village for judges, light rail to carry the tourists expected during the Games, as well as better housing for the area’s residents.

To their surprise, they began unearthing hundreds of artifacts dating from the early 1800s.

“These objects prove the existence, the materialization of this terrible process in the human history — the history of the slave,” says Claudio Honorato, a historian with the New Blacks Institute for Research and Memory.

I meet Honorato at a spot rife with historical import: the Valongo Wharf, where close to half-a-million slaves were off-loaded during Brazil’s slave trade. It was built in 1811, then later buried, only to be unearthed again during a $2-billion excavation project.

Port Area Rennos-2

“The development work was really to be done faster but they had to stop the process,” Honorato says. “The Museum of Tomorrow and the Mauá Pier were expected to be opened in 2011 with a big party and were only opened now. When they came upon all the African-Brazilian materials — these archeological traces — the development work had to stop.”

That’s because developers have to comply with legislation passed in Rio relatively recently that says no development can go ahead on land where evidence of historical interest has been discovered, without doing further archeological research.

“This port area was a place where a lot of ships from Africa came, bringing 500,000 slaves,” says Ondemar Dias, with the Brazilian Archeological Institute. “The amount of materials related to these cultures demonstrates, along with other research, that it’s a very important place to tell the story of this culture that came to Brazil.”

….”We have lots of objects in the museums here that are, for instance, gifts of African embassies to our emperor, and even other objects that were conquered in wars in Africa,” Honorato says. “These, on the other hand, were objects built here. They are part of the culture of these individuals who lived in this society, who contributed to this society.

“I think this is a material that reveals the day-to-day life, the common life, in the places that these Africans lived, where they’ve worked, where they’ve celebrated. And that’s why we call this the ‘slavery paths in Rio de Janeiro.’ It reveals the aspects of this ‘Little Africa’ — what they were actually doing in their daily life.”

African history, he says, has rarely been valued in Brazil. At other sites of historical importance, discoveries have been quietly covered up to enable construction to continue. But now advocates are hoping to turn the area’s African history into an important tourist attraction.

“That’s why Brazil is requesting that this place go on the World Heritage list,” Dias says.

There are already tours incorporating the area’s African history, including an area where the bodies of dead slaves were dumped. Honorato says he hopes this will lead to a change in attitudes; that African history will no longer be buried, like the Valongo Wharf.

“[It’s important] to preserve this history, to preserve this culture, this memory,” he says. “And also ensure the memory of those who resisted, and are here, until the present moment.”

Source: No longer buried: Rio’s slave past unearthed at Valongo Wharf during Olympic renovations – World – CBC News

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Where should we put Canada’s counter-radicalisation programme? Gurski

2016/03/28 Leave a comment

Phil Gurski is right on this one. Better to have this outside of Public Safety. Canadian Heritage, now that the Multiculturalism Program is back, is likely the better home (Economic and Social Development, while another alternative, is simply too large a department to provide effective oversight).

However, that being said, given that it is in Minister Goodale’s mandate letter rather than Mme. Joly’s, I don’t see this happening.

And Public Safety has funded a number of good research projects under the Kanishka Project (named after the Air India coming of 1985):

This move represents a significant shift in Canada’s CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) approach from the purely hardline emphasis of the Harper government to a more inclusive and more comprehensive one under the new regime (note that the previous government did have a soft CVE aspect, and one in which I worked, but did not fund it adequately and actually undermined it with stupid comments by public officials).  As I have said before, we will always need the hardline tool, but we need to do more in early intervention and counter radicalisation.

One question remains: where should this new office reside?  When I still worked for the federal government it was housed within Public Safety Canada, split between the National Security Policy branch and Citizen Engagement.  In some ways, it should stay there if for no other reason that that department has experienced and capable staff who were part of the amazing success of the shortened efforts under Harper.

But in other, more important ways, it should be moved to another department.  Let me try to explain why.

Aside from getting a brand new start and being able to put the unfortunate mistakes of the previous government behind us, the biggest drawback to leaving Canada’s CVE strategy with Public Safety lies with the very nature of that ministry.  Public Safety Canada is the umbrella department for CSIS, the RCMP, Correctional Services Canada and the Canadian Border Services Agency.  All of these are staffed by dedicated and professional people but they have one underlying commonality: they are all enforcement/punitive agencies.  CVE needs to be seen as an opportunity to occur before people engage in activities that are the remit of CSIS and the RCMP in order to work.

We have seen in other places like the UK with its PREVENT programme that communities associate CVE with intelligence gathering and enforcement, whether or not that is what is happening.  Having a ministry responsible for the national spy and law enforcement agencies run CVE creates a stigma that can hamper even the best efforts.  If communities do not feel comfortable and have issues of trust with certain partners, they will not want to participate.

What if the government put the new office under the Heritage portfolio?  CVE is all about providing communities with the tools to foster Canadian citizenship and reject the empty and violent promises of groups like Islamic State. It is about being or becoming Canadian.  Another aspect is the debate over narratives.   I have long argued that we need to move away from “counter narratives” to “alternative narratives”.  Alternative narratives are an important part of CVE – what better place to locate them than within Heritage, the department that helps foster the Canadian narrative?  Our narrative is so superior to that of IS that if this were a boxing match the referee would have called the fight years ago.

Of course, those with lots of experience in CVE, especially the RCMP which has a longstanding and robust outreach programme, would be asked to lend its assistance and best practices.  Other partners could also contribute.  Canada is – or rather was – a world leader in CVE and many countries look to us for models on what to do.  We don’t need to reinvent it, we just need to tweak it to make it better.

At the end of the day it really doesn’t matter where the government decides to put CVE.  The important thing is that it cultivate good relations with the communities it hopes to work with, for the best answers to violent radicalisation and extremism are to be found there, not in a government policy brief.

Source: Borealis Threat & Risk Consulting

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization Tagged with , , , , ,

ICYMI: Canadian and U.S. right not that different | Supriya Dwivedi 

2016/03/28 Leave a comment

Interesting to see this kind of commentary in The Sun:

The Canadian right also seems to be just as allergic to the term political correctness as their American counterparts. When former Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the election was underway, he made an overt reference to political correctness, stating, “now is not the time for political correctness”.

Several commentators noted it was an odd remark to make at the onset of the election, but as the campaign started to unfold it became clear why Harper made the reference. As much as conservative pundits might opine that those on the left are merely afraid of being anything other than politically correct, I’m not sure that the repudiation of things like the Barbaric Cultural Practices Tip Line, reference to “old-stock” Canadians and obsession with what Muslim women are allowed to wear during a citizenship ceremony was the embracing of political correctness as much as it was the rejection of veiled xenophobia.

More recently, in an interview with Embassy News Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu (Sarnia-Lambton) stated that Trump’s rhetoric has been positive for free speech advocates: “The only bright light is that he has sort of restored freedom of speech to America”. Gladu went on to assert that many people in Canada are fearful of saying what they think out of fear of being accused of “breeding hatred and fear”.

It’s worth asking where Gladu thinks she lives, considering Canada is still indeed a free state, and people are free to think, believe and say what they choose. Similarly, people with opposing viewpoints are free to say they disagree. That is what freedom of speech is. Evidently, confusing freedom of speech and freedom from consequences of that speech is something that Conservatives and Republicans have in common.

The Conservatives were not completely off-base in trying to appeal to nativist politics. The support is there. It just won’t win you a majority anymore. Canadians may not be as comfortable in the overt displays of racism as our American brethren, but we are inclined to dabble in our homegrown brand of racism that tends to be framed in a more palatable manner. It’s coded, it’s often implicit, but it’s there.

Perhaps we’re not the enlightened, toque-wearing citizenry that we like to make ourselves out to be, eh?

Source: Canadian and U.S. right not that different | DWIVEDI | Columnists | Opinion | To

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Why Canada should keep its religious freedom office: US advocates

2016/03/26 Leave a comment

More advocacy regarding keeping the Office of Religious Freedom, this time from US counterparts, Robert P. George and Katrina Lantos Swett:

This flurry of engagement is happening for good reason: Religious freedom conditions are deteriorating dramatically. According to a number of studies, at least three-quarters of the world’s people live in countries that perpetrate or tolerate serious religious freedom abuses, ranging from the denial of permits to build houses of worship to the imprisonment, torture and murder of the persecuted.

Persecutors include secular tyrannies such as that of China, which persecutes religious adherents from Christians and Uighur Muslims to Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong; and North Korea, perhaps the most world’s most repressive country. They also include theocratic states, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, and violent groups, such as Boko Haram in Nigeria, Buddhist extremists in Myanmar, and the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq (among other places).

Thanks in part to the existence of USCIRF (United States Commission on International Religious Freedom), the U.S. House of Representatives recently gave unanimous approval to a resolution decrying the Islamic State’s horrifying violence against Christians, Yazidis and other religious minorities as religiously motivated genocide. Others have also deemed it genocide, from Pope Francis to the European Parliament.

For humanitarian reasons alone, silence is no option in the face of those who violate religious freedoms. QBut there is a further reason for concern. Speaking in 2014 about the Middle East, Jean Benjamin Sleiman, the Archbishop of Baghdad, said: “I do not think Europe will be calm. This … does not stop at territorial boundaries.” His words were prophetic: Five months later, in January, 2015, the same religious extremism that was plaguing his own country struck the office of the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine and a kosher supermarket in Paris.

The lesson is clear. Standing up for religious freedom is not just a moral imperative but also a practical necessity for any country seeking to protect its security and that of its citizens. At such a time as this, Canada should not retreat from its leadership role in advancing this fundamental human right.

Religious freedom merits a permanent seat at the table of a great country’s foreign policy. Canada has given freedom of conscience such a seat through its Office of Religious Freedoms. May it retain this critical seat so long as religious freedom is threatened anywhere in the world.

Source: Why Canada should keep its religious freedom office – The Globe and Mail

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Why Foreign Fighters Come from Francophone Countries | Foreign Affairs

2016/03/26 Leave a comment

Interesting take by William McCants and Christopher Meserole (thanks to those who brought it to my attention), and another indicator of the failure of the French (and Belgian) models of integration (and in the case of France, laïcité):

As with the Francophone finding overall, we’re left with guesswork as to why exactly the relationships between French politics, urbanization, youth unemployment, and Sunni militancy exist. We suspect that when there are large numbers of unemployed youth, some of them are bound to get up to mischief. When they live in large cities, they have more opportunities to connect with people espousing radical causes. And when those cities are in Francophone countries that adopt the strident French approach to secularism, Sunni radicalism is more appealing.

For now, the relationship needs to be studied and tested by comparing several cases in countries and between countries. We also found other interesting relationships—such as between Sunni violence and prior civil conflict—but they are neither as strong nor as compelling.

Regardless, the latest attacks in Belgium are reason enough to share the initial findings. They may be way off, but at least they are based on the best available data. If the data is wrong or our interpretations skewed, we hope the effort will lead to more rigorous explanations of what is driving jihadist terrorism in Europe. Our initial findings should in no way imply that Francophone countries are responsible for the recent horrible attacks—no country deserves to have its civilians killed, regardless of the perpetrator’s motives. But the magnitude of the violence and the fear it engenders demand that we investigate those motives beyond just the standard boilerplate explanations.

Source: Why Foreign Fighters Come from Francophone Countries | Foreign Affairs

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization Tagged with , , ,

Denmark may strip radical imams of citizenship

2016/03/26 Leave a comment

Charging them with hate speech would be appropriate:
Denmark might soon be able to strip radicalized imams of citizenship. The proposal is expected to be supported by a majority in parliament.

The initiative comes from the anti-immigration Danish People’s Party, and has received backing from the ruling Liberal Party, the opposition Social Democrats and the Conservative party.

“The Constitution says that one must practice his faith as long as it is not contrary to morals or disturbing to the public order,” Martin Henriksen, Danish People’s Party’s spokesman told the Berlingske newspaper on Monday.

“When imams endorse or recommend stoning or when an imam tells a woman subjected to violence by her husband, that that’s okay, then it [may be considered] subversive speech that disturbs the public order. Some of these imams are Danish citizens, and we think we should deprive them of their citizenship,” he said.

The proposal was made in particular to withdraw citizenship from Abu Bilal, a leading imam at the Grimhoj mosque in the city of Aarhus. A recent documentary, ‘Mosques behind the Veil,’ revealed that the imam advocated the stoning of adulterous women and the killing of apostates.

Danish Prime Minister Lokke Rasmussen urged MPs to come up with measures to counter the growth of radical Islam after the documentary exposed the activities of such radical mosques.

The Danish People’s Party is set to make two new proposals in the upcoming set of negotiations with the Danish PM. The party is to present a draft resolution on stripping Abu Bilal of his Danish citizenship and then to review the Constitution’s clause on religious freedom.

Rasmussen said that he will be willing to “push the limits” of the interpretation of the Danish Constitution when reviewing the proposals, the Local reported.

“We are open to all solutions that can stop the radicalized imams,” said Trine Bramsen, the Social Democrats’ spokesman, according to the Berlingske newspaper.

 Source: Denmark may strip radical imams of citizenship — RT News

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