Fatima Payman walked a path familiar to many of us – work within a system or disrupt it from the outside, Faith-based politics will be bad for social cohesion and Islam:

2024/07/06 Leave a comment

Two different takes, starting with the activist perspective of Sisonke Msimang:

Senator Fatima Payman has cut a lonely figure in the past week. The first-time senator has spoken with a clarity that is rare among politicians from the major parties. Having found her voice dissenting from her party’s tepid position on Palestine, Payman seems to have hit her stride. Her departure from the Labor party is no surprise, but as the decision loomed, it was clear that she had resonated with communities with strong ties to Palestine.

Since October last year, the Labor party has tried to walk a cautious path in the face of unfolding atrocities in Gaza. As Sarah Schwartz, executive officer of the Jewish Council of Australia, wrote this week: “While our government has called for a ceasefire, they refuse to name Israel’s crimes or take the material action many have called for under international law including implementing sanctions and throwing our weight behind a global arms embargo.”

Payman’s actions have put her former party’s failure to lead with a conscience in the face of horror under a microscope. In making Gaza an issue worth breaking with tradition for, Payman achieved a cut-through on Labor’s position on Palestine the party has thus far evaded. The spotlight was clearly not welcome.

In this fractious week, Payman has shown the nation that you don’t have to be the most powerful person in the room to have an impact.

The path Payman has walked is familiar to many people from marginalised communities across Australia. We are often the most vulnerable people in an organisation – lower paid, most burdened by systemic inequalities, most precariously contracted. And yet, because of the nature of the society we live in, we are frequently called upon to be courageous and to take hard stands in defence of the values of the communities we represent. We are often aware that if we don’t speak up, people in the mainstream are unlikely to understand the issues we are putting on the table.

A week ago, at the beginning of this saga, Payman invoked the memory of her father to explain the responsibility she felt to support Palestinian statehood. Insisting that she would not simply go along with party policy on a matter of principle, Payman said: “I was not elected as a token representative of diversity, I was elected to serve the people of Western Australia and uphold the values instilled in me by my late father.”

Those words resonated with many people I have spoken to in migrant communities across the country. Payman is like so many other women of colour who have pushed for change inside organisations that – whether intentionally or not – are hostile to ideas they don’t like or tone deaf to the effect they are having on minority groups. And like many others before her, Payman has had to make tough choices about whether to work within the system or seek to make change in more visibly disruptive ways.

Payman has refused to deny one of the defining issue of our times, but hers is also a story about what it means to try to play a broken game when you are part of a minoritised group in this country.

Though Labor has improved its diversity, its caucus is still overwhelmingly white. According to Per Capita thinktank research fellow and Labor activist Osmond Chiu, the proportion of non-European-background, non-Indigenous MPs in federal Labor is close to 10% whereas in the general population that figure is 25%.

Like others who enter largely monocultural spaces, Payman is confronted with a set of rules and procedures that have worked well for the majority but have significant drawbacks for those who haven’t always belonged to the club. To sway a caucus room, you need seniority and a certain kind of standing – commodities that take time to build and are not guaranteed even when young people, women and people of colour are outstanding at their jobs.

Even if Payman had been persuasive (and to be clear, the Labor party did not seem to be interested in being persuaded on this matter), she would likely have encountered an age-old problem: those who defend the status quo thrive by claiming issues raised by people from ethnic minority communities are themselves minor or tangential. We saw this in action when the PM expressed frustration this week about the fact that he was talking about Payman and Palestine instead of tax cuts.

The message was clear – Payman was a distraction and what he really wanted to talk about was cost of living and other matters regular Australians care about. The sub-text was rich.

As it turns out, Australians can walk and chew gum at the same time. They can appreciate the tax cuts and empathise with a young senator who has managed to elevate an issue that has been bubbling away for months but that has largely been treated as a foreign policy matter by the major parties. The war on Gaza isn’t simply happening over there. Seven decades into the Israeli occupation, Palestinians have created a formidable diaspora, and many of those people have created lives in Australia. They in turn have created networks and have friends and neighbours. In a multicultural society it is these types of ties that make it hard for so many of us to tolerate the bombing of Gaza.

As she leaves Labor, Payman reminds her colleagues that genocide is not someone else’s problem. Importantly, she is seeking to prove that if you choose to ignore a genocide, communities that have families, relatives and loved ones at risk overseas may feel that you don’t care about them either.

Politics is not easy for anyone, least of all for leaders from ethnic and religious minority groups. Some play an inside game, while others seek to make change from the outside. Both strategies are important. Pushing the destruct button can sometimes make progress easier for those who choose to remain inside.

This fierce woman, whose family made a new life here after fleeing Afghanistan, has much to teach us about self-determination. Surely the country that has praised itself for giving her shelter can accept that human rights for all means exactly that – in Gaza now more urgently than ever. Payman’s actions this week have been a reminder that if we allow it to be, speaking truth to power is the most powerful gift multiculturalism can give this society. We can all learn from that.

Sisonke Msimang is the author of Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home (2017) and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018)

Source: Fatima Payman walked a path familiar to many of us – work within a system or disrupt it from the outside

From the Australian PM:

The introduction of sectarian politics to Australia in the wake of Fatima Payman’s defection would risk further harm to social cohesion and be bad for the Islamic community, Anthony Albanese has warned.

The prime minister also rounded on Senator Payman by rubbishing her claims that her defection from Labor was spontaneous rather than orchestrated, and implying she should resign altogether and give back her Senate seat to the party that put her in parliament.

“Fatima Payman received around about 1600 votes,” he said of the Senate result in WA at the last election.

“The ALP box above the line received 511,000 votes. It’s very clear that Fatima Payman is in the Senate because people in WA wanted to elect a Labor government.

“And that’s why they put a number one in the box above the line, next to Australian Labor Party, rather than voted below the line for any individual.”

On Thursday, after six weeks publicly agitating against Labor’s position over the Israel-Gaza war, Senator Payman quit and moved to the crossbench as an independent for Western Australia.

She left open the possibility of forming a political party but said she did not intend to collaborate with The Muslim Vote, a group of Islamic community organisations based on a model in the UK that plans to run candidates against federal Labor MPs with large Muslim populations.

Senator Payman has met representatives of The Muslim Vote as well as micro-party specialist Glenn Druery, who has also advised the group.

Mr Albanese on Friday warned against introducingfaith- basedpolitics into Australia.

“I don’t want Australia to go down the road of faith-based political parties because what that will do is undermine social cohesion,” he said.

“My party has in and around the cabinet and ministerial tables people who are Catholic, people who are Uniting Church, people who are Muslim, people who are Jewish.

“That is the way that we’ve conducted politics in Australia. That’s the way you bring cohesion.”

There are many in the major parties who fear an Islamic political push could reignite Islamophobia, something with which Mr Albanese appeared to concur.

“It seems to me as well beyond obvious that it is not in the interest of smaller minority groups to isolate themselves, which is what a faith-based party system would do,” he said.

Source: Faith-based politics will be bad for social cohesion and Islam: PM

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , ,

In Sweden, concern grows over anti-Muslim hate incidents

2024/07/05 Leave a comment

Of note and a reminder that hate is happening to both Jews and Muslims:

On the night of Tuesday, May 28, a car parked in front of the Skövde mosque, which opened in 2023, just outside the town between Gothenburg and Stockholm. The driver threw the corpse of a wild boar against the building, which is in a small wood, before driving off, unaware that the surveillance cameras installed by the Bosnian Islamic Association had filmed the action. “Unfortunately, we’re used to this sort of thing,” said Mirza Babovic, 66, an employee of the association. He reeled off incidents such as Islamophobic tags painted outside the former prayer hall, the remains of a pig dumped on the building site and the windows of a container smashed.

This time, Imam Smajo Sahat, who reported it, decided not to publicize the incident, “so as not to give publicity to its perpetrator, nor to give ideas to others.” He did not want to worry his followers either. But local journalists got wind of it and before long, the national media began to report it, “no doubt because it happened just a few days before the European elections,” said the imam, still dismayed by the violence of the discourse against Islam and Muslims during the campaign.

In November 2023, far-right leader Jimmie Akesson – whose Sweden Democrats party has been allied with the right-wing coalition government since October 2022 – declared that he wanted to destroy mosques, ban the construction of new buildings and wiretap Muslim religious communities in order to combat “Islamism.” His right-hand man, Richard Jomshof, president of the parliamentary legal affairs committee, followed suit, calling for a ban on all symbols of Islam in public spaces, which he likened to “the swastika.”

Shocking remarks

On social media, party officials have constantly denounced the “Islamization of Sweden,” claiming that “Swedes are on the verge of becoming a minority in their own country.” This rhetoric is not new. Back in 2009, a year before his party entered parliament, Akesson asserted that Muslims were “the biggest threat to Sweden.”

Source: In Sweden, concern grows over anti-Muslim hate incidents

Filed under Hate crimes, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Babb: School boards shouldn’t rush into adopting anti-Palestinian racism strategies

2024/07/04 Leave a comment

Sensible but unlikely to be followed:

…People will also likely struggle to understand what differentiates anti-Palestinian racism from Islamophobia. For the average person, many forms of racism, including, for instance, antisemitism and Islamophobia, are already difficult to comprehend, let alone address. By adding anti-Palestinian racism into the mix, there is serious potential to further complicate the anti-racism landscape at a time when efforts to combat many forms of racism are struggling to achieve substantive results.

Going forward, senior decision makers – particularly those responsible for educating and protecting our children – need to start having more realistic and difficult discussions before moving toward knee-jerk initiatives that could threaten certain groups of people. Indeed, there are reasons why hundreds of concerned parents, educators and community leaders protested outside the building where the vote took place. They’re worried about the future of their children in Canada’s public-school system, and many are left feeling more vulnerable than they ever have before. One Jewish community leader recently told me that despite all of the things he has seen since Oct. 7, the situation in the schools is what has him the most worried.

If we’re going to focus on anti-Palestinian racism, it needs to be done right, and it needs to be done after all voices are heard and difficult discussions are had.

Source: School boards shouldn’t rush into adopting anti-Palestinian racism strategies

Filed under Antisemitism, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

France: Citizenship, equality, jus soli: Republican principles cannot be betrayed

2024/07/04 Leave a comment

Good commentary:

You can’t equate a “political adversary and an enemy of the Republic”: This demand was clearly carried out by Albane Branlant, a candidate for Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, who could have stood in the second round of the parliamentary elections but withdrew in favor of the left-wing candidate François Ruffin to help beat the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) in their Somme district. Far from being rhetorical, this demand is an imperative.

In contrast to this resolute and consistent defense of the “republican front” against the far right, the procrastination of leaders of the outgoing governing coalition and, worse still, the blindness of the part of the members of the right-wing Les Républicains who have not allied with the RN, reflect a loss of fundamental political bearings. The situation in France, which in a few days’ time risks being led by the heirs of a long anti-republican political history, calls for a painful but essential review of the hierarchy of priorities. At the top of the hierarchy is the defense of the principles inherited from the French Revolution.

In this respect, the RN’s plans to discriminate against dual nationals, roll back the right to citizenship for people born in France, and create a “national priority” are far less acceptable than any of the other policy platforms submitted to the electorate.

Unconstitutional discrimination

The promise to ban dual-nationals from certain civil servant jobs revives the far right’s long-standing obsession with the “false French,” which, from Charles Maurras’s Action Française monarchist movement to the Vichy regime, fueled hatred of Jews, calling them “unassimilable” and pushing for measures to “denaturalize” them. Today, it targets French people of Muslim culture or religion, accused of being “French on paper” but of dubious allegiance.

Insulting and absurd from an economic, cultural, security and diplomatic point of view, the hunt for dual nationals also amounts to unconstitutional discrimination between French citizens. In the RN’s arsenal, it adds to the astonishing plan to completely abandon jus soli, the right to citizenship for any person born in France, running against the principle of integration by birth through the socialization in France of children of foreigners. This principle has been enshrined in the Constitution or in French law since 1791, and not even Vichy wanted to call it into question. As for the “national priority,” it relies on self-proclaimed “common sense” to attack the constitutional principles of equality and solidarity.

Wind of revolt

What the RN’s first two projects have in common is that they would weaken France’s sovereignty by confining large segments of its population to foreign nationalities. All three measures, by multiplying attacks on the egalitarian and fraternal foundations of our society – in other words, on the republican promise – would provoke anger, resentment and violence. All the while opening up an immediate conflict with the Constitutional Council, whose current president, Laurent Fabius, appointed for nine years by President François Hollande in February 2016, has demonstrated his vigilance on this matter.

If constitutional and historical references appear to carry little weight in the face of the strong wind of revolt represented by the RN’s score in the first round of the elections, political leaders deciding on withdrawals for the second round who ignore or neglect them will bear a heavy responsibility: That of having sold out centuries of republican accomplishments in hazardous electoral bargaining.

Source: Citizenship, equality, jus soli: Republican principles cannot be betrayed

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Adams and Parkin: Canadians don’t need to worry about identity politics

2024/07/03 Leave a comment

Useful reminder:

On Canada Day, there is nothing wrong with focusing on what we have in common. But in doing so, we can celebrate the fact that what brings us (and keeps us) together is a respect for the things that sometimes make us different. That is the paradox, and the beauty, of what we call national unity.

Michael Adams is the founder and president of the Environics Institute for Survey Research. Andrew Parkin is the Institute’s executive director.

Source: Canadians don’t need to worry about identity politics

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Gurski: Again, the Liberals show they don’t really understand national security

2024/07/02 Leave a comment

Interesting commentary on the IRGC listing and related security issues:

Last week saw a flurry of activity from the Canadian government on national security.  First, it announced on June 19 that the IRGC — Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — had been formally “listed” as a terrorist entity. Then the Senate approved Bill C-70 calling for the establishment of a foreign agent registry.

I will defer comments on C-70 for later and focus on the significance – if any – of the decision to add the IRGC to a large number of “listed entities.” The government crowed that it took this move after “years” of hard work and claimed this demonstrated, yet again, how seriously it takes national security.

Except that the IRGC move was not all that urgent: the Conservatives asked that the Liberal government list this group back in 2018, which makes you wonder what took so long. It is not as if the government needed to study whether the IRGC merited this rank given its 40 years of support for other listed entities (among which are Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad) and well-known penchant for mucking about in the Middle East and elsewhere. Calling it a terrorist group now does not exactly constitute rocket science.

The terrorist listing tool dates back to 2002 (full disclosure: I wrote the first al-Qaida listing that year while working as a senior terrorism analyst at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, CSIS) and is used to identify groups the government believes engage in terrorist activity. It is handy largely from a financing perspective: if you are daft enough to send a cheque or e-transfer to Hamas leadership, you are guilty of terrorist financing.

But aside from that, the listing process suffers from two problems. First, it is not essential for a group (or individual) to be listed to warrant attention and investigation from our protectors (Communications Security Establishment, CSIS, RCMP, etc.). We at CSIS had been looking at al-Qaida for decades prior to the creation of the list; in other words, we did not need some mandarin to say “gee, AQ is a terrorist group, maybe our spies should monitor it.” Furthermore, the non-appearance of a group (or individual) from the list does not preclude investigating it (or him/her). Our spies aren’t waiting for orders to carry out their work in accordance with their well-established practices and legislative mandates.

Second, the listings are often purely political in nature. The addition of the Proud Boys in January 2021 was clearly a knee-jerk reaction to the raid on the U.S. Capitol by a dog’s breakfast of wankers, including some members of the U.S. branch of this group. The chapter in Canada has never carried out a single act of violence in this country and frankly, to cite a friend of mine who investigated the far right in Canada in the 1990s, couldn’t make a cheese sandwich. Sources told me that CSIS was not in favour of listing the Proud Boys as the group did not merit that kind of attention/status.

Sometimes groups are “delisted” for purely political reasons too. The Harper government took the anti-Iranian People’s Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI, better known as the MeK) off the list in the early 2010s, despite its use of violence here and abroad. Go figure.

The timing of the IRGC decision also raises eyebrows. Just before the House of Commons rose for the summer? Did the government think no one was paying attention?  Just before a byelection in Toronto? To show it takes national security “very seriously” (to quote Chrystia Freeland)? To deflect criticism of its handling of the ongoing People’s Republic of China interference gong show?

For what it is worth, I have no issue with naming the IRGC a terrorist entity. I worked as an Iranian analyst for 20 years at both CSE and CSIS, and I understand what this ideological bunch of thugs stands for.

At the same time, the choice of day/month for this action does nothing to shake my belief that this government neither comprehends nor cares about national security. The IRGC could have been listed 20 years ago, and in all honesty should have been part of the original process just after 9/11. Making a big deal of it now just looks, well, political.

Phil Gurski is President and CEO of Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting.
http://www.borealisthreatandrisk.com

Source: Gurski: Again, the Liberals show they don’t really understand national security

Filed under Radicalization Tagged with , ,

Yakabuski | Ne pas apprendre de ses erreurs [Dattani]

2024/07/02 Leave a comment

Agreed. Where is the vetting? And for not disclosing this information, Dattani shouild be automatically disqualified:

Lors de la Journée internationale dédiée à la mémoire des victimes de l’Holocauste de cette année, la présidente intérimaire de la Commission canadienne des droits de la personne (CCDP), Charlotte-Anne Malischewski, s’est déclarée « profondément préoccupée par la montée fulgurante de l’antisémitisme » qui s’observe au Canada depuis les attaques du Hamas sur Israël commises en octobre dernier.

« Lorsque la haine se présente dans nos communautés, elle menace la sécurité publique, la démocratie et les droits de la personne, a-t-elle tenu à rappeler. La haine nous divise et nous oppose les uns aux autres. »

Dans le contexte actuel, où la guerre à Gaza a fait de la communauté juive canadienne le bouc émissaire des critiques visant le gouvernement israélien de Benjamin Nétanyahou, on se serait attendu à ce que le ministre fédéral de la Justice, Arif Virani, s’efforce de trouver un digne successeur à Mme Malischewski pour occuper sur une base permanente ce poste se trouvant au sommet de la hiérarchie des instances des droits de la personne au Canada.

D’autant plus que la CCDP se verra octroyer de nouveaux pouvoirs en vertu du projet de loi C-63 sur les préjudices en ligne afin de déterminer la validité des plaintes concernant le contenu haineux. Le nouveau président de la CCDP doit lui-même être au-dessus de tout soupçon de parti pris pour ou contre tout plaignant qui s’adressera à la commission.

Or, en nommant Birju Dattani à la présidence de la CCDP, le 15 juin dernier, M. Virani semble avoir surtout cherché à plaire à l’aile progressiste du Parti libéral du Canada. La nomination de cet ancien directeur de la Commission des droits de la personne du Yukon et « défenseur de l’équité, de la diversité et de l’inclusion » rappelle celle d’Amira Elghawaby, devenue l’an dernier représentante spéciale chargée de la lutte contre l’islamophobie, qui s’est vue hantée par ses écrits considérés comme antiquébécois après l’annonce de sa nomination.

Mme Elghawaby s’est vite excusée. Mais son acte de contrition a aussitôt été remis en doute par les politiciens québécois, et sa crédibilité en a irrémédiablement été entachée. Si elle a pu garder son poste, elle est toutefois devenue quasi invisible depuis son entrée en fonction.

Le cas de Birju Dattani est beaucoup plus grave. Selon les révélations publiées cette semaine dans les médias torontois, le passé de cet ancien président de l’Association des étudiants musulmans de l’Université de Calgary est semé de propos antisémites et d’associations douteuses. Alors qu’il étudiait à Londres, en 2012, il a participé à une manifestation devant l’ambassade d’Israël au cours de laquelle les manifestants répétaient le slogan « le sionisme, c’est du terrorisme ». En 2015, alors qu’il était chargé de cours dans la capitale britannique, il a participé à une conférence aux côtés d’un membre du groupe fondamentaliste islamiste Hizb ut-Tahrir, qui prône la charia et que le gouvernement britannique a inscrit sur sa liste des organisations terroristes prohibées cette année.

Le Centre consultatif des relations juives et israéliennes ne demande rien de moins que le retrait de sa nomination. Selon l’organisme, M. Dattani « a partagé des articles comparant Israël à l’Allemagne nazie, a participé à une table ronde au Royaume-Uni avec un membre du Hizb ut-Tahrir, […] qui cherche à établir un nouveau califat et s’oppose à l’existence d’un État israélien, et a donné à plusieurs reprises des conférences sur le mouvement Boycott, désinvestissement et sanctions (BDS) lors de la Semaine contre l’apartheid israélien dans des universités britanniques ».

Le bureau d’Arif Virani a plaidé l’ignorance en disant que M. Dattani ne l’avait pas informé de ses gazouillis controversés ou de son militantisme anti-Israël lors du processus de nomination à la présidence de la CCDP. À l’époque où il vivait à Londres, M. Dattani utilisait un autre prénom. Cela n’épargne toutefois pas le ministre d’être accusé d’avoir failli à la tâche de procéder à des vérifications rigoureuses avant de le nommer.

M. Virani promet maintenant d’effectuer un examen officiel de la nomination de M. Dattani avant le 8 août, soit la date de son entrée en fonction à la tête de la CCDP, et de rendre le rapport de cet examen public. Pour sa part, M. Dattani s’est excusé cette semaine dans une entrevue au Globe and Mail, où il reconnaît que ses propos et ses gazouillis antérieurs ont pu blesser des membres de la communauté juive. « Je ne le ferais pas maintenant », a-t-il souligné, en précisant que son opinion avait « évolué » depuis.

Tant mieux si Birju Dattani reconnaît ses torts. Sa nomination reste néanmoins irrecevable. Après tout, il a manifestement essayé de cacher ses propos antérieurs aux membres du bureau du ministre de la Justice, qui lui ont certainement demandé, lors du processus de nomination, de leur faire part de toute information potentiellement compromettante sur son passé. Les Canadiens doivent pouvoir croire en l’impartialité de la CCDP pour que cette instance conserve la crédibilité nécessaire au bon accomplissement de sa fonction critique, qui est celle de protéger la population canadienne contre la discrimination.

Quant au gouvernement de Justin Trudeau, disons que la nomination de M. Dattani est un autre exemple d’un excès de zèle progressiste, qui se retourne encore une fois contre lui. Disons qu’il ne semble pas apprendre de ses erreurs.

Source: Chronique | Ne pas apprendre de ses erreurs

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USA: Newly naturalized citizens could theoretically swing the election: Report

2024/06/29 Leave a comment

Tends to assume that new voters are potentially monolithic in their voting intentions:

The number of foreign nationals in the U.S. currently eligible for naturalization outnumbers the 2020 presidential margin of victory in five battleground states.

A report released by the American Immigration Council (AIC) on Thursday concluded that if some or all of the country’s 7.4 million not-yet-naturalized-but-eligible residents got their citizenship before November, they could swing the 2024 election.

That’s unlikely to happen, as the naturalization process for eligible foreign nationals takes roughly eight months from application to receiving a certificate of citizenship.

But the report highlights the disconnect between the size of immigrant communities, their economic impact and their political power.

It says immigrants make up 13.8 percent of the U.S. population, but only 10 percent of eligible voters.

And potential citizens could in theory sway both battleground states and a couple of key red ones.

The researchers found that 574,800 immigrants in Florida are likely eligible to naturalize, while former President Trump’s margin of victory there was 371,686 votes.

In Texas, the naturalization-eligible population is estimated at 789,500, and the 2020 presidential margin of victory was 631,221.

The margin of victory in some battleground states pales in comparison to the number of potential new voters.

In Arizona, 164,000 people can apply for citizenship, and the vote difference was 10,457, about a 16-to-1 ratio; in Georgia, the ratio is about 13-to-1.

Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin all show up on the list, with naturalization-eligible resident to 2020 victory margin ratios of around 8-to-1, 3-to-1, 2-to-1, and 5-to-2, respectively.

The report also found that immigrants paid 16.2 percent of all taxes paid by U.S. households in 2022, despite having less political representation.

Source: Newly naturalized citizens could theoretically swing the election: Report

Filed under Citizenship, Multiculturalism, Politics Tagged with , ,

Rioux | La gauche et l’antisémitisme

2024/06/29 Leave a comment

On current French debates in the lead up to the elections and in general:

« Nous ne vivons pas un antisémitisme résiduel, mais un antisémitisme pesant, visible, palpable. Notre fille l’a vécu dans sa chair. » Ceux qui parlent ainsi sont les parents de cette enfant de 12 ans violée la semaine dernière dans un local désaffecté de Courbevoie.

Un geste d’une sauvagerie tellement inconcevable qu’il est devenu, à quelques jours du premier tour, l’un des événements marquants de cette campagne éclair des élections législatives en France. L’enfant a été violée, torturée, menacée d’être brûlée et soumise à une tentative d’extorsion par trois jeunes musulmans de 12 et 13 ans pour la seule et unique raison qu’elle aurait dissimulé à son petit ami qu’elle était juive. Celui-ci lui aurait « clairement reproché d’être juive, en affirmant qu’elle était forcément pro-Israël et complice d’un génocide en Palestine », selon son avocate, Muriel Ouaknine-Melki, présidente de l’Organisation juive européenne.

Craignant des représailles depuis le pogrom du 7 octobre, sa mère avait conseillé à la jeune fille de se faire discrète. La petite avait déjà perdu des amies à cause de la religion de ses parents.

Ce viol antisémite n’est pas un fait divers. C’est un fait de société qui illustre la peur croissante dans laquelle vivent des milliers de Juifs en France. Les actes antisémites recensés ont bondi de 300 % au premier trimestre de 2024, comparativement à la même période en 2023, année où ils étaient déjà en hausse.

Certains feront mine de s’en étonner, nombreux sont pourtant ceux qui nous avaient mis en garde. Cela va de Boulaem Sansal à Kamel Daoud, en passant par Smaïn Laacher et Georges Bensoussan, qui avait été poursuivi pour avoir affirmé que, dans nombre de familles influencées par l’islamisme, « l’antisémitisme, on le tète avec le lait de la mère ». Traîné devant les tribunaux, il sera relaxé en 2019 « de toute accusation de racisme et d’incitation à la haine ».

On pourra chipoter sur la formulation, reste que l’antisémitisme est consubstantiel à cet islamisme qui se répand en France. Nombre de familles juives fuient d’ailleurs les banlieues pour protéger leurs enfants ; certaines envisagent même de quitter le pays.

Qui aurait pu s’imaginer que 80 ans après la Seconde Guerre mondiale et 37 ans après les déclarations antisémites de Jean-Marie Le Pen, la France serait à nouveau déchirée par un tel débat ? À la différence près que cet antisémitisme est aujourd’hui associé à la gauche.

Depuis des mois, La France insoumise (LFI) refuse de qualifier le Hamas d’organisation « terroriste ». Un jour, son leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, accuse la première ministre d’origine juive, Élisabeth Borne, de défendre un « point de vue étranger ». Le lendemain, il reproche à la présidente de l’Assemblée, Yaël Braun-Pivet, elle aussi d’origine juive, de « camper à Tel-Aviv ». Selon lui, l’antisémitisme serait « résiduel en France ». Une déclaration qualifiée de « scandale » par le socialiste Raphaël Glucksmann, lui-même victime de tags antisémites.

Cette complaisance relève-t-elle d’une conviction profonde ou d’une simple stratégie électorale ? Chose certaine, depuis des mois, LFI a multiplié les signes en direction de l’électorat musulman où, selon un sondage de l’IFOP publié en 2020, 57 % des jeunes de 15 à 24 ans considèrent que la loi islamique devrait avoir préséance sur celle de la République.

Hier symboles de l’« Argent », les Juifs seraient-ils devenus celui du « Colonialisme », comme on dit dans le vocabulaire woke ? Ce ne serait pas la première fois qu’une partie de la gauche pactise avec l’antisémitisme, une attitude qu’à son époque, le social-démocrate August Bebel avait qualifiée de « socialisme des imbéciles ». Les exemples vont de Jean Jaurès, qui disait que « l’oeuvre de salubrité socialiste culmine dans l’extirpation de l’être juif », à l’Humanité, qui qualifia Léon Blum de « Shylock », en passant par Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, qui désignait « le Juif » comme « l’ennemi du genre humain » et voulait « abolir les synagogues ».

Un peu d’histoire permet de constater que personne n’a le monopole de la vertu. Elle permet aussi de relativiser cette affirmation pour le moins étonnante de l’avocat Arié Alimi et de l’historien Vincent Lemire, selon qui l’antisémitisme du Rassemblement national serait « ontologique » alors que celui de LFI ne serait que « contextuel ». L’histoire montre qu’il n’y a pas d’atavisme antisémite. Jaurès n’a-t-il pas finalement défendu Dreyfus ? L’écrivain Georges Bernanos, disciple de l’antisémite Drumont, n’a-t-il pas combattu courageusement le franquisme et le régime de Vichy ?

On comprend pourquoi, en refusant de participer à la grande manifestation unitaire contre l’antisémitisme du 12 novembre dernier, Emmanuel Macron a commis l’une des fautes les plus graves de son quinquennat. Quant à Jean-Luc Mélenchon, il n’a de cesse de flatter son électorat dans le sens du poil. « Certains discours politiques ont fait des Juifs des cibles légitimes », dit le président du Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France (CRIF), Yonathan Arfi, d’ailleurs traité d’« extrême droite » par Mélenchon. Selon une récente étude réalisée par l’IFOP, 35 % des jeunes de 18 à 24 ans estiment qu’il est justifié de s’en prendre à des juifs en raison de leur soutien à Israël.

Les parents de la jeune martyre de Courbevoie ont dénoncé avec raison un « mimétisme » sordide entre les actes perpétrés par les terroristes du Hamas et ce que leur fille a subi. Nul doute que ces événements pèseront sur les résultats de dimanche prochain.

Source: Chronique | La gauche et l’antisémitisme

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Korea’s multicultural demographic changes call for new youth support policies

2024/06/27 Leave a comment

Of interest:

As the number of preschoolers from multicultural families dwindles due to the low birthrate, calls grow for systemic support for youth, away from current multicultural policies that focus primarily on underage children.

Experts underscore the importance of bolstering bilingual education. Rather than specifically differentiating children with multicultural backgrounds, they advocate for a more inclusive approach that benefits multicultural children.

According to a new report from the Korean Education Statistics Service, released Sunday, which highlights the major trends and challenges in multicultural education through statistics, there were 12,526 multicultural births in 2022. This accounts for 5 percent of the 249,186 total births in Korea in the same year.

Multicultural births in the report refer to cases where at least one parent is foreign or a naturalized citizen.

Considering there were 22,908 multicultural births in 2012, the number has declined sharply by more than 10,000 births, or approximately 45.3 percent, over the past decade. During this period, the decline in multicultural births mirrored the overall decrease in domestic births.

The average age for marriage within multicultural families is rising, and fewer babies are being born to women under 30, according to the report.

Specifically, the proportion of multicultural couples marrying under 24 fell from 30.8 percent in 2012 to 17.4 percent in 2022. Conversely, marriages involving individuals over 30 increased from 44.4 percent to 58.6 percent over the same period.

Additionally, the percentage of multicultural babies born to mothers under 29 dropped significantly, from 61.8 percent in 2012 to 31.3 percent in 2022.

A notable demographic shift is expected within Korea’s multicultural population, with a decrease in preschoolers and a gradual increase in middle and high school students, as well as adults in their early 20s.

As of 2022, 89.7 percent of all multicultural students are in elementary and middle school. Looking ahead, the proportion of middle and high school students, along with youth aged 19 to 24, is projected to rise.

Mo Young-min, vice chairman for research at the Korean Education Development Institute and author of the report, emphasized the necessity of policy-level attention and establishing a support system for youth with multicultural backgrounds, pointing out that current multicultural policies focus primarily on young children.

According to the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, it is expanding projects to provide fundamental education and career guidance, facilitating the smooth adaptation of children from multicultural families to school life.

Meanwhile, experts stress the need to prioritize bilingual education in support measures for children from multicultural families. They advocate for an approach that respects and incorporates the culture and language of their parents’ countries….

Source: Korea’s multicultural demographic changes call for new youth support policies

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

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