Good piece abound the visit by Premier Wynne’s visit to Amritsar’s Golden Temple, the spiritual centre of Sikhdom, and the controversy it provoked:
As for Wynne, her visit to the Golden Temple proved anti-climactic. Despite the media speculation, she received the traditional gift of a siropa robe of honour — though the deed was done, diplomatically, in the basement (as opposed to the sanctum sanctorum, minimizing any awkwardness for the temple’s current leadership, who remained publicly coy on precisely how and by whom the honour was bestowed).
Lest anyone be too judgmental of the public coyness of Golden Temple officials — and their subsequent circumlocutions about Wynne’s circumambulations — one must concede that homophobia is nothing new, whether in the West or the East. Coincidentally, India’s Supreme Court is now revisiting antiquated laws on homosexuality inherited (and imported) from British colonial rule. Canada phased out discrimination against gay marriage only in 2005, and American states are just now catching up.
The lesson for politicians making the pilgrimage to Punjab is that it can sometimes be a delicate dance. You may walk into trouble, as Wynne nearly did, or you may wrong-foot yourself, as Brown might have (until his recent circumspection on sexual orientation).
Good for Wynne for standing her ground, without trampling on local sensitivities. Good for Brown for belatedly standing up against homophobia, after previously stooping to the level of local homophobes and gay-baiters who hyperbolized the sex-ed update.
Rather ironic that the head of the OIC is speaking of the importance of multiculturalism and tolerance when so many of its members practice the opposite.
My news feeds haven’t picked up any Australian media coverage which might have a different take on the meeting from this Pakistan media clip:
The Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Iyad Ameen Madani stressed in his meetings with officials in Australia on the importance of multiculturalism in countering violence and intolerant discourse.
In the capital Canberra Mr. Madani met Wednesday with the Prime Minister, Mr. Malcolm Turnbull, who stated that Australia is absolutely committed to maintaining multiculturalism and it has proven its success in that.
The Secretary General underlined the importance of Australia to OIC, considered it a good example of implementing multiculturalism and looked forward to working with it on capacity building, humanitarian aid and addressing regional issues of mutual concern.
The Secretary general also met the Minister of Justice and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister of Counter Terrorism, Michael Keenan MP, at Parliament House. They exchanged views on ways to counter extremism and such terrorist groups as Daesh.
Mr. Madani stressed that security and military measures are not enough; instead there is a need to look at economic, social and cultural aspects and to put effort in building institutions, giving hope to the youth and create development.
The Secretary General reiterated these points in his meeting with the Attorney General of Australia, Hon George Brandis QC, who underlined the need for understanding Islam, its true tenants and diversity in order challenge extremists on both sides.
The Secretary General also met with Assistant Minister for Multicultural Affairs, Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, who explained the basis for Australian multiculturalism of mutual respect and pride in ones culture, which has been nurtured through various measures.
Two decades after pledging to assess the gender impact of federal government policies, Ottawa is still falling short in its efforts, meaning that obstacles to both men and women still stand, auditor general Michael Ferguson says.
In an audit report released Tuesday, Ferguson reported some progress on the file but cautioned that Ottawa’s commitment to assess the gender impact of its policy decisions was still haphazard.
“We observed that gender-based analysis is still not fully deployed across the federal government 20 years after the government committed to applying this type of analysis to its policy decisions,” Ferguson said.
He noted that while Status of Women Canada, Treasury Board and Privy Council Office have made progress in this area, the gender analyses done by departments and agencies were “not always complete, nor of consistent quality.”
“This means gender considerations, including obstacles to the full participation of diverse groups of men and women, are not always considered in government decisions,” he said.
New Democrat MP David Christopherson said the audit findings are evidence the federal government is not taking the issue seriously.
“Imagine, 20 years later and there (are) still six departments that don’t even have a framework for recording the information, let alone doing something about it. We’re a long, long way from where we need to be,” he told reporters.
At a 1995 United Nations conference on women, Ottawa committed to analyze the “gender-specific” impacts on women and men before making decisions on policies, legislation and programs across government.
Those considerations should include assessing the differences between men and women, which could include age, education, language, geography, culture and income.
Such analysis is meant to flag whether an initiative could have unintended impacts, or perhaps treats men and women differently.
Ferguson’s audit team examined 16 initiatives undertaken by four departments: Employment and Social Development; Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development; Industry Canada; and Natural Resources.
The audit found that the departments performed gender-based analyses for all initiatives but did not always complete them. For example, in one case, analysis of a funding program for skills training did not flag the under-representation of women in the information, communications and technology field.
In another case, the review of an apprentice loan program did not examine barriers to access training and trades for women, visible minorities and immigrant women, the audit found.
Ferguson’s report flagged a number of systemic barriers to gender-based analysis, starting with the fact that such assessments are not mandatory. As well, he noted the tight deadlines for developing policy initiatives and limited ability of some departments and agencies for doing this work.
And the report found that Status of Women Canada was unable to track whether gender-based analysis was being considered in the decision-making across government.
Ferguson’s report urges the Privy Council Office, Status of Women and Treasury Board to “take concrete actions to identify and address barriers that prevent systematic conduct of rigorous gender-based analysis.”
Still, the audit report did find progress in implementing gender-based analysis compared to 2009, the last time the auditor general’s office reviewed the issue.
Patricia Hajdu, the minister of status of women, said she agreed with the audit findings that while progress had been made, “more needs to be done.”
“Our government has been clear about its commitment to consider the gender impacts of our decisions. We will use the auditor general’s report as a renewed call for action within the federal government,” she said Tuesday.
Still, Hajdu said that the government is not considering make gender-based analysis mandatory.
Google is experimenting with a program that would redirect U.K. users searching for words linked to religious extremism to content designed to counter radicalization, a company executive has said.
Anthony House, Google’s senior manager for public policy and communications, told British lawmakers in a parliamentary committee hearing about the pilot initiative, which was targeted at reducing the online influence of groups like ISIS, the Guardianreported Tuesday.
“We should get the bad stuff down, but it’s also extremely important that people are able to find good information, that when people are feeling isolated, that when they go online, they find a community of hope, not a community of harm,” House said.
At least 700 British citizens have traveled to Iraq and Syria to join jihadist organizations, the BBC reports.
An ambitious approach with clear, quantifiable goals, publicly available that provide accountability:
Intel set a goal last year: of all new hires, 40 percent have to be women or under-represented minorities (black, Latino, Native American). The company had never hit that level in the past. So for Intel, it was an ambitious goal. And the company reports today: it managed to exceed it, hitting 43.1 percent.
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich shares some of his motivation: “I have two daughters. They’re both technically very bright. I want them to come into a workplace that’s a better place than the way the workplace is today.”
To do that, he says, Intel has to open up about how it’s doing inside. “There’s nothing here [that’s] top secret or should not be shared with the rest of the world in my mind.”
Other tech giants don’t agree. Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft — companies that value metrics so much — have not publicly stated any measurable goals when it comes to diversity hiring, or the retention of employees. They haven’t disclosed the numbers of new hires or of exits from their companies, by gender and race.
Facebook, Google and Microsoft say their goals are not publicly available. An Apple spokesperson says the company has purposely decided to not set goals.
Intel is now an exception. Today’s report gets in the weeds. The company aims to increase its external diverse hiring rate to 45 percent this year, and it’s establishing a new target within this goal of a 14 percent hiring rate for underrepresented minorities.
There’s a sense of urgency. By 2020, Krzanich says, Intel must reach “full representation.”
By that he does not mean the company will look like America or its global consumer base. He means it’ll reflect the available talent pool. Intel has a long way to go — currently at 75 percent male and a combined 86 percent white and Asian.
Interesting contrast to the repression of the Uighurs:
As the call to prayer echoed off the high walls of the madrasa and into the surrounding village, dozens of boys, dressed in matching violet caps, poured out of their dorm rooms and headed to the mosque.
That afternoon prayer ritual, little changed since Middle Eastern traders traversing the Silk Road first arrived in western China more than 1,000 years ago, was at once quotidian and remarkable.
That is because in many parts of the officially atheist country, religious restrictions make it a crime to operate Islamic schools and bar people under 18 from entering mosques.
Asked about the Chinese government’s light touch here, Liu Jun, 37, the chief imam at the Banqiao Daotang Islamic School, offered a knowing smile.
“Muslims from other parts of China who come here, especially from Xinjiang, can’t believe how free we are, and they don’t want to leave,” he said, referring to the far-west borderlands that are home to China’s beleaguered Uighur ethnic minority. “Life for the Hui is very good.”
With an estimated Muslim population of 23 million, China has more followers of Islam than many Arab countries. Roughly half of them live in Xinjiang, an oil-rich expanse of Central Asia where a cycle of violence and government repression has alarmed human rights advocates and unnerved Beijing over worries about the spread of Islamic extremism.
But here in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, a relatively recent administrative construct that is the official heartland of China’s Hui Muslim community, that kind of strife is almost nonexistent, as are the limitations on religion that critics say are fueling Uighur discontent.
Throughout Ningxia and the adjacent Gansu Province, new filigreed mosques soar over even the smallest villages, adolescent boys and girls spend their days studying the Quran at religious schools, and muezzin summon the faithful via loudspeakers — a marked contrast to mosques in Xinjiang, where the local authorities often forbid amplified calls to prayer.
In Hui strongholds like Linxia, a city in Gansu known as China’s “Little Mecca,” there are mosques on every other block and women can sometimes be seen with veils, a sartorial choice that can lead to detention in Xinjiang.
Buried in Ross Douthat’s concerns regarding immigration and integration, is an endorsement of Canadian and Australian approaches:
As someone who is (obviously) skeptical of the elite-level consensus on immigration’s benefits, I’m glad to see the G.O.P. and conservatism tilting away from George W. Bush/Rubio-Schumer “comprehensivism” on immigration policy. But I also think that the stampede to Trumpism is being unduly influenced by a conflation of the American and European situations. Europe faces a real, potentially deep and epoch-defining crisis — a refugee problem that could threaten the very foundations of the continent’s post-Cold War order. America faces a much more normal sort of policy quandary, to which the ideal political response could reach the destination that Salam proposes in his essay — sharper limits on low-skilled migration and a more Canadian or Australian approach to immigration as, effectively, recruitment — without huge and wrenching shifts, mass deportations, religion-specific entry bans, and all the rest of the Trumpian bill of goods.
So while we should be guided, no less than Europe, by a greater prudence than our leadership has shown to date, we should also recognize that what is (for Germany especially) now a crisis Over There remains as yet an opportunity for us.
Good lengthy piece by Andrew Mack providing context and data regarding violent extremism:
The reality is that Islam—like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and other major world religions—is neither inherently violent nor inherently peaceful. Like every other great religion, the history of Islam is darkened by periods of violent bloodletting. And the holy texts of all religions can be mined for quotes to legitimize terrorism—or indeed principled nonviolence.
Thus ISIS and other extreme Islamist radicals have no difficulty finding justification in medieval Islamic texts for their ultra-violent ideology and barbaric practices. But these extreme interpretations have minimal support among Muslims around the world and tell us nothing about the propensity for violence in mainstream Islam.
In October 2014, the first opinion polls on public attitudes toward ISIS were published in three Arab countries for the Fikra Forum. The findings were instructive. Just 3 percent of Egyptians held favorable views of ISIS. The figure for Saudi Arabia was 5 percent and for Lebanon less than 1 percent. A year later Pew Research found that just 1 percent of Lebanese held “favorable opinions” of ISIS, 3 percent in predominantly Sunni Jordan, and 1 percent in Israel. In the Palestinian territories the figure was 6 percent, but even here a massive 84 percent held unfavorable opinions of ISIS. Previous polls revealed very similar trends about Muslim opinions toward al-Qaida.
Discussions about the violence of contemporary Islam focus overwhelmingly on armed conflict and terrorism. But a more appropriate metric for determining the propensity for violence of a particular society, culture, or religion is the incidence of intentional homicide.
In almost all societies it is murder, not war, that accounts for the large majority of intentional killings. And perpetrating homicide, unlike embarking on wars or terror campaigns, does not require long preparation, intensive organization, a huge range of weaponry, complex logistics, political mobilization, intensive training, or a great deal of money—which is one reason why war and terrorism death tolls around the world are far smaller than the number of homicides. It is far more difficult to mount an armed campaign against a state than to kill an individual.
And even today, wars directly affect only a relatively small minority of countries. All countries suffer from homicides, however. In 2015, the Global Burden of Armed Violence published by the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, found that between 2007 and 2012, for every individual killed in war or terror campaigns around the world, seven individuals were murdered. Worldwide, for most people, in most countries, most of the time, murder is a far greater threat to human security than organized political violence.
So if there really is an inherent—Islam-driven—propensity for deadly violence in Muslim societies, we should expect to find that the greater the percentage of Muslims in society, the greater would be the numbers of homicides. In fact, the reverse is the case: The higher the percentage of Muslims in a society, the lower the homicide rate.
In 2011, a major study by University of California, Berkeley, political scientist M. Steven Fish presented cross-national statistical data showing that between 1994 and 2007, annual homicide rates in the Muslim world averaged just 2.4 per 100,000 of the population. That was approximately a third of the rate for the non-Muslim world and less than the average rate in Europe. It is also approximately half the homicide rate in the United States.
In comparing individual countries, the difference is even greater. The latest homicide statistics from the U.N.’s Office on Drugs and Crime reveal that for every murder perpetrated in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim state, seven people are murdered in the United States. This reality should give American Islamophobes pause.
It is possible in principle, as some critics have argued, that the lower murder rates in Muslim countries could be due not to a generally low propensity for homicide but to authoritarian governments whose harsh anti–violent crime policies are more effective in reducing the incidence of murder than those of democracies like the United States. But Fish’s careful statistical analyses controlled for this possibility and found no evidence to support it.
When it comes to war, Fish found no statistical evidence to support Samuel Huntington’s controversial “clash of civilizations” thesis that Muslim societies are inherently more war-prone than non-Muslim states.
Moreover, a lot depends on what type of war is being counted. A 2011 analysis by the Human Security Report looked at which states had fought most international wars—including colonial wars—since the end of World War II. The top four were France, Britain, Russia/Soviet Union, and the United States—in that order. No Muslim-majority country was in the top eight.
Yet another metric for determining the violence-proneness of countries is the “conflict year,” the number of armed conflicts—civil as well as international—that a country experiences in a calendar year. Some particularly conflict-prone countries—Burma is the prime example—have frequently found themselves fighting several different wars in a single calendar year for decades. Here the Human Security Reportfound that the countries that had experienced most “conflict years” since the World War II were—in this order—Burma, India, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Britain, France, Israel, and Vietnam. Again no Muslim-majority country was in the top eight.
Fish does not, however, claim that Muslim societies are less violent than those in the non-Muslim world with respect to all forms of deadly violence. Indeed, he points out that when it comes to terrorism, Islamist radicals were responsible for 70 percent of deaths from “high-casualty terrorist bombings” around the world between 1994 and 2008. This means, he suggests, that while terrorism is very far from being a uniquely Muslim phenomenon, “… its perpetrators in recent times are disproportionately Islamists.” Since 2010, the incidence of Islamist terrorism has increased sharply.
But in this context it is instructive to note that approximately 600 million of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims live in Southeast Asia and China, while a little more than half that number—317 million—live in the Middle East and North Africa. Yet the rate of deadly political violence associated with radical Islamist groups in Southeast Asian and China today is only a tiny fraction of that of the less populous Muslim states of the Middle East and North Africa region.
Why should the level of political violence in the populations of these two regions differ so dramatically even though they share the same allegedly violence-prone religion? One possible answer is thatreligion is not the primary driver of conflict in these regions. In Southeast Asia, national governments in Muslim-majority countries have what political scientists call “performance legitimacy”—meaning they deliver the goods and services that their citizens want. With few exceptions, the governments of their co-religionists in the Middle East and North Africa do not.
In the radical Islamist conflicts that are tearing apart Syria, Iraq, and other parts of the region, the exclusionary politics, state repression, rights abuses, corruption, and incompetence of the regimes that the radicals have sought to overthrow provide more compelling insights into what drives the abhorrent violence of ISIS than does the extreme Islamist ideology that seeks to legitimize the killing.
Almost comical – the 9/11 hijackers were all clean shaven so unclear how this is really an effective strategy:
In a bid to curb Islamist radicalization, authorities in the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan shaved the beards off nearly 13,000 men in the country. They also shut down about 160 shops selling traditional Islamic garb and supposedly “convinced” more than 1,700 women to stop wearing hijabs, or head coverings.
According to Radio Free Europe’s Tajik service, the measures were taken in the southwest Khatlon region, which borders Afghanistan. The region’s head of police said that 12,818 men with “overly long and unkempt beards” were “brought to order” in 2015.
The secular regime of President Imomali Rakhmon is known for its hard-line opposition to political Islam. From 1992 to 1997, Tajikistan endured a bitter civil war between government forces loyal to Rakhmon and an Islamist opposition. Estimates suggest that 50,000 to 100,000 people were killed.
The government has taken steps to push back against Islamic traditions it claims are being imported from Afghanistan. The U.S. State Department has estimated that more than 90 per cent of its population is Muslim, and that religious adherence appears to be growing in the country. Rakhmon, a secular leader though a Sunni himself, has been in power since 1992. His authoritarian government has repeatedly expressed concern over the rise of Islam, linking it to extremism.
Rakhmon had even linked the wearing of the hijab to prostitution in a televised address. In September, the country’s Supreme Court banned the only registered Islamist political party that was officially recognized. And in December, Rakhmon assumed further powers after parliament granted his family lifelong immunity from prosecution and designated him “the founder of peace and national unity of Tajikistan.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, troubles remain in this deeply impoverished nation of about 7 million people. Hundreds of Tajik nationals are thought to be in Iraq and Syria among the ranks of the Islamic State militant group. Last year, the chief of an elite police unit assigned to combating Islamist extremists disappeared and is now thought to have joined the Islamic State.
