Klein Halevi: The war against the Jewish story  

2024/05/06 Leave a comment

Necessary read and questioning of the approach and effectiveness previous and current Holocaust education:

How has it come to this? How is it possible that Israel, rather than radical Islamism, would become the villain on liberal campuses? That thousands of students would be chanting “from the river to the sea” even as the Hamas massacre revealed that slogan’s genocidal implications? That the most passionate outbreak of student activism since the 1960s would be devoted to delegitimizing the Jewish people’s story of triumph over annihilation? 

This moment didn’t happen in a vacuum. The anti-Zionist forces in academia have been preparing the ground for decades, systematically dismantling the moral basis of each stage of Zionist and Israeli history. 

The attack began on the very origins of Zionism, which was transformed from a story of a dispossessed people re-indigenizing in its ancient homeland into one more sordid expression of European colonialism. (Europe’s post-Holocaust gift to the Jews: leaving us with the bill for its sins.) 

Next, the birth of Israel in 1948 was reduced to the Nakba, or catastrophe, a Palestinian narrative of total innocence that ignores the ethnic cleansing of Jews from every place where Arab armies were victorious and the subsequent uprooting of the entire Jewish population of the Muslim world. Post-1967 Israel was cast as an apartheid state – turning Zionism, a multi-faceted movement representing Jews across the political and religious spectrum into a racist ideology and reducing an agonizingly complex national conflict into a medieval passion play about Jewish perfidy. 

And now, with the Gaza War, we have come to the genocide canard, the endpoint in the process of delegitimization.

To turn Israel into the world’s arch-criminal requires three forms of erasure. The first is of the connection between the land of Israel and the people of Israel. In the anti-Zionist telling of the conflict, a 4,000-year connection that has been the heart of Jewish identity and faith is irrelevant, if not contrived outright by Zionists.

The second is the erasure of the relentless war against Israel, placing its actions under a microscope while downplaying or entirely ignoring the aggression of its enemies. There is never any context to Israel’s actions. Only by erasing Hamas’s atrocities can Israel be turned into the villain of this war. 

In focusing on Israel’s actions and dismissing those of Hamas, campus protesters are providing cover for October 7 denialism. This is a new version of the Holocaust denialism prevalent in parts of the Muslim world: The atrocities didn’t happen, you deserved them and we’re going to do it again (and again). 

On a recent trip to New York, walking along Broadway on the Upper West Side, I saw dozens of defaced posters of kidnapped Israelis. Rather than tear down the posters, the vandals had blacked out the Israeli faces – a literal defacement. And a useful metaphor for the anti-Zionist assault on our being.

The third form of erasure is dismissing the history of peace offers presented or accepted by Israel and uniformly rejected by the Palestinian side. No offer – an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza, the re-division of Jerusalem, the uprooting of dozens of settlements – was ever sufficient. It is hard to think of another national movement representing a stateless people that rejected more offers of self-determination than the Palestinian leadership.

The ease with which anti-Zionists have managed to portray the Jewish state as genocidal, a successor to Nazi Germany, marks a historic failure of Holocaust education in the West.

This moment requires a fundamental rethinking of the goals and methodology of Holocaust education. By over-emphasizing the necessary universal lessons of the Holocaust, many educators too easily equated antisemitism with generic racism. The intention was noble: to render the Holocaust relevant to a new generation. But in the process, the essential lesson of the Holocaust – the uniqueness not only of the event itself but of the hatred that made it possible – was often lost. 

Antisemitism is not merely the hatred of Jews as other but the symbolization of The Jew – that is, turning the Jews into the symbol for whatever a given civilization defines as its most loathsome qualities. For Christianity until the Holocaust, The Jew was Christ-killer; for Marxism, the ultimate capitalist; for Nazism, the defiler of race. And now, in the era of anti-racism, the Jewish state is the embodiment of racism. 

Holocaust education was intended, in large part, to protect the Jewish people from a recurrence of the antisemitism that reduces Jews to symbols. Yet the movement to turn Israel into the world’s criminal nation emerges from a generation that was raised with Holocaust consciousness, both in formal education and the arts. And this latest expression of the antisemitism of symbols is justified by some anti-Zionists as honoring “the lessons of the Holocaust.” 

Unlike the Iranian regime, which clumsily tries to deny the historicity of the Holocaust, anti-Zionists in the West intuitively understand that coopting and inverting the Holocaust is a far more effective way of neutralizing its impact.

Many, perhaps most, of the campus protesters are likely not antisemitic. They may have Jewish friends or be Jewish themselves. But that is irrelevant: They are enabling an antisemitic moment.

What is under assault is the integrity of the mid-20th century Jewish story, of a people rejecting the self-pity of victimhood and fulfilling its most improbable dream: renewing itself, in its broken old age, in the land of its youth. The shift from the lowest point Jews have known to the reclamation of power and self-confidence is one of the most astonishing feats of survival not only in Jewish but world history. It is that story that is being distorted and trivialized and demonized on liberal campuses. 

I recently completed a lecture tour of some of the most Jewishly problematic campuses, from Columbia to Berkeley. In meetings with Jewish students, I was repeatedly told about a pervasive atmosphere of hostility toward Israel, even among many otherwise apolitical students. While the protests are an immediate threat to Jewish well-being on campus, the far deeper problem is the impact of the anti-Zionist campaign, linking the name “Israel” with racism and genocide. The vulgar protesters are a small minority, but they are shaping the attitudes of a whole generation. 

By focusing only on the immediate threat of the protests, we risk repeating the mistake we’ve made over the last decades of failing to adequately confront the systematic assault on our story.

We are losing a generation, but we haven’t yet lost. Like other radical movements, anti-Zionism could go too far in its righteous rage, potentially alienating the majority. Perhaps that process has already begun. 

The challenge of our generation is to defend the story we inherited from the survivor generation. We need to tell that story with moral credibility, in all its complexity, frankly owning our flaws even as we celebrate our successes, acknowledging the Palestinian narrative even as we insist on the integrity of our own. 

We desperately need new strategies to counter the anti-Zionist assault. A good beginning would be the creation of a brain trust, composed of community activists, rabbis, journalists, historians, public relations experts, that would devise both immediate responses to the current crisis and a long-term strategy, emulating the decades-long patient work of the anti-Zionists. 

The Jews are a story we tell ourselves about who we think we are; without our story, there is no Judaism. It is long past time to mount a credible defense of our mid-20th century story, which continues to sustain us as a people. 

Source: Klein Halevi: The war against the Jewish story  

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Clark: Foreign interference is a threat chipping away at pieces of democracy

2024/05/06 Leave a comment

Good commentary on risks:

….Instead, Justice Hogue’s report describes foreign actors – China, mainly – chipping away at pieces of Canada’s democracy. But those pieces matter. And they add up.

“It is likely to increase and have negative consequences for our democracy unless vigorous measures are taken to detect it and better counter it,” Justice Hogue wrote.

That’s the conclusion worth following here. Canadians – voters, candidates, constituents – feel real effects. Diaspora communities feel intimidated. There is a risk politicians alter their messages out of fear of foreign governments. And this is a growing danger…..

Source: Foreign interference is a threat chipping away at pieces of democracy

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Widening Racial Disparities Underlie Rise in Child Deaths in the U.S.

2024/05/06 Leave a comment

Of note:

Thanks to advancements in medicine and insurance, mortality rates for children in the United States had been shrinking for decades. But last year, researchers uncovered a worrisome reversal: The child death rate was rising.

Now, they have taken their analysis a step further. A new study, published Saturday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, revealed growing disparities in child death rates across racial and ethnic groups. Black and Native American youths ages 1 to 19 died at significantly higher rates than white youths — predominantly from injuries such as car accidents, homicides and suicides.

Dr. Coleen Cunningham, chair of pediatrics at the University of California, Irvine, and the pediatrician in chief at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, who was not involved in the study, said the detailed analysis of the disparities documented “a sad and growing American tragedy.”

“Almost all are preventable,” she said, “if we make it a priority.”

Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University and Children’s Hospital of Richmond had previously revealed that mortality rates among children and adolescents had risen by 18 percent between 2019 and 2021. Deaths related to injuries had grown so dramatically that they eclipsed all public health gains.

The group, seeking to drill deeper into the worrying trend, obtained death certificate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s public WONDER database and stratified it by race, ethnicity and cause for children ages 1 to 19. They found that Black and American Indian/Alaska Native children were not only dying at significantly higher rates than white children but that the disparities — which had been improving until 2013 — were widening.

The data also revealed that while the mortality rates for children overall took a turn for the worse around 2020, the rates for Black, Native American and Hispanic children had begun increasing much earlier, around 2014.

Between 2014 and 2020, the death rates for Black children and teenagers rose by about 37 percent, and for Native American youths by about by about 22 percent — compared with less than 5 percent for white youths.

“We knew we would find disparities, but certainly not this large,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor of family medicine at the V.C.U. School of Medicine, who worked on the research. “We were shocked.”

The racial and ethnic disparities were most drastic when injuries were isolated from other causes of death. For example, Black children died by homicide at 10 times the rate of white children between 2016 and 2020. When the study’s lead author, Dr. Elizabeth Wolf, an associate professor of pediatrics at the V.C.U. School of Medicine, compared accidents with intentional injuries, the sobering realities of the mental health crisis came into focus.

Native American children died by suicide at more than twice the rate of white children, whose rate was already high.

“As a pediatrician, that really took my breath away,” she said.

Gun-related deaths, including accidents, homicides and suicides, were two to four times as high among Black and Native American youths than among white youths, and the risk of dying from a gun-related injury more than doubled among Black and Native American youths between 2013 and 2020.

The researchers also drew attention to disparities in other causes of death: Native American children died from pneumonia and the flu at three times the rate of white children, for example, and Black children died from asthma at almost eight times the rate of white children.

This particular study did not examine all of the variables that contribute to the causes of childhood illness, injury and death. Dr. Wolf said she hoped the paper would serve as a “wake-up call” and galvanize researchers to scrutinize the underlying factors.

Understanding the reasons for the increase in car accident deaths, for example, could determine whether redesigned intersections or targeted seatbelt campaigns would be the most effective intervention for a specific group.

For other childhood deaths, access to care is a likely factor, given that Black children with circulatory diseases are less likely to be referred for transplants and less likely to have a successful procedure compared to white children. Asthma-related disease and death are likely to be affected by access to interventions such as inhalers, as well as socioeconomic and environmental factors like air pollution.

At the same time, Dr. Woolf said, policymakers should not “wait for more research to identify the obvious next steps,” including mental health support for children and stricter gun laws. The public perception of gun violence among children is often focused on school shootings, he said, but statistically speaking, “the vast majority occur in communities across our country — day by day, one by one.”

Source: Widening Racial Disparities Underlie Rise in Child Deaths in the U.S.

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Social justice or medical expertise: What do patients want more from their doctors?

2024/05/06 Leave a comment

Rhetorical question for patients. One thing to have awareness and understanding of the social determinants of health and to improve data and understanding of health factors that affect different groups, but how will anti-oppression language improve health outcomes:

For over a year Canadian physicians have been debating the CanMEDS roles, which is a framework describing the competencies required of specialist doctors certified by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. These roles are taught in medical school and form part of the basis for the students’ evaluations.

The roles include physician as communicator, collaborator, leader, health advocate scholar and professional. The central role is physician as medical expert, which integrates the other roles.

In the March 2023 special issue of the Canadian Medical Education Journal, the CanMEDS 2025 interim report was distributed for open public feedback and included a suggestion to centre social justice anti-racism and anti-oppression, rather than medical expertise.

A massive push back from physicians against the decentering of medical expertise arose and has been continuing since publication of the report.

Now, in a March 2024 issue of the CJME, one of the authors of the March 2023 report and others are responding to the negative responses. They claim that opposition to the decentering of medical expertise simply represents “medicine perpetuat(ing) its own power” and maintaining “medicine as an institution steeped in power and privilege.”

This is a deadly serious issue for medical education and for the care of patients. It matters not whether a surgeon is engaged in social justice for the patient who makes it to the operating room. At that point only medical expertise counts.

I learned this during my training at St. Michael’s Hospital in the late 1970s. A man living in a shelter was admitted to hospital for an urgent heart valve replacement. The surgeons saved his life but were not focused on social justice. Their expertise and attention were directed to the patient and nothing else.

Of course, post surgically he had no place to live and hospital personnel had a duty to find him an adequate place to which he could be discharged. But that would be all for naught had it not been for the expertise of the surgeons. That determined everything else. Medical expertise trumped all.

Confronting inequities and racism in health care is inseparable from confronting system-wide and societal inequities. Doctors alone cannot solve that, but they can at least be competent physicians technically and remain current on the science and standards of care for ailing people.

Beyond that they may choose to engage as any other caring citizen and fight fiercely for justice, freedom and truth in the health care system and in general.

They cannot be taught, mandated, and scripted to do so in the detached world of academic medicine. That is elitism at its worst, as if doctors should lead the charge for social justice.

There is a certain personal irony for me. Nearly 20 years ago I gave the first advocacy lecture in the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine undergraduate curriculum. I stated up front to the students that I was not sure why I was even giving the lecture. I have given the same talk dozens of times since.

Here is how I introduced my talk and then with breathtaking hypocrisy continued on with the presentation:

“In my judgment, all advocacy means is being a socially responsible and good citizen, values both personal and ideological that are part of being a human and could not possibly — and maybe, should not — be taught by the universities. After all, what business is it of medical faculties to be teaching and evaluating political philosophies within the context of a curriculum?

“But how can the matter of advocacy be incorporated into medical practice and medical school curricula? It should be expected that physicians advocate on behalf of individual patients, who might benefit from an experimental therapy for a life-threatening disease. Physicians should actively intervene on behalf of a group of patients who are being denied access to a standard treatment. And physicians must intervene when a neighbourhood is at a health risk because, for example, of an environmental hazard.”

I still do not think that it is the business of medical faculties to be teaching and evaluating political philosophies within the context of a curriculum.

The public, if they were ever asked I am certain, would choose a competent surgeon, if that is all the surgeon could offer. They can secure their social justice elsewhere, with or without doctors.

Philip Berger is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a longstanding downtown Toronto physician.

Source: Social justice or medical expertise: What do patients want more from their doctors?

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Israel plans changes to Palestinian education to remake how children are taught

2024/05/04 Leave a comment

Hard to see how this will work. And of course, similar care needs to be taken with the Israeli curriculum. Good concluding quote:

…Yuli Tamir, a scholar and former cabinet minister who is president of Beit Berl College, said changes to schools can only succeed if they comes with much broader social and political change.

Ms. Tamir, who was Israel’s education minister from 2006 to 2009, provoked an outcry when as part of an effort to teach Israeli students about Palestinian history she reintroduced to textbooks a mention of the nakba – when Israeli forces drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes 1948 – and a map containing the green line, the pre-1967 borders of Israel.

It was a “mild change,” Ms. Tamir said, designed to foster understanding. It didn’t last long. “They took it out immediately when I left.”

By the same token, she said, teachers in Gaza should not be held uniquely responsible for fighting antisemitism when “the whole system hates Jews – the parents, the authorities, the health care,” she said.

It takes a change in governing priorities, she said, for education to successfully shift course.

“Curriculum is a representation of the state,” she said. “More than a flag. Or an anthem. This is what you tell your children you are all about.”

Source: Israel plans changes to Palestinian education to remake how children are taught

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La bouée de sauvetage des travailleurs temporaires coule

2024/05/04 Leave a comment

Of note, regarding open work permits for Temporary Foreign Workers:

De Vancouver à Gaspé, des personnes immigrantes attendent durant des mois la réponse à leur demande de permis ouvert pour travailleurs vulnérables afin de fuir les abus qu’elles subissent. Un programme d’urgence censé offrir cette protection rapidement est bloqué, selon cinq organisations qui accompagnent les travailleurs dans de telles démarches.

Une forme de soupape pour remédier aux risques du permis lié à un seul employeur, appelé « permis fermé », le programme a été lancé en 2019 avec la promesse de traiter les demandes en cinq jours. Ce délai est d’autant plus problématique que les responsables politiques l’utilisent pour se défendre des critiques, notamment formulées par le rapporteur spécial des Nations unies sur les formes contemporaines d’esclavage.

Mais cette manière « rapide » de « régler la situation des employés vulnérables », comme l’a décrite le ministre de l’Immigration, Marc Miller, en commission parlementaire, est en panne. Sur la soixantaine de demandes que ces organisations ont soumises depuis janvier dernier, seulement cinq ont été traitées, ont-elles confirmé au Devoir. 

Sur les 1349 demandes reçues pour les trois premiers mois de l’année 2024, Réfugiés et Citoyenneté Canada (IRCC) n’a délivré que 201 permis jusqu’à maintenant, soit nettement sous la moyenne de l’an dernier. Une trentaine de permis seulement ont été octroyés en mars. La page Web du programme a été modifiée en catimini depuis novembre 2023.

Ces réponses qui arrivent au compte-gouttes créent une « situation intenable » et « énormément de pression » sur les immigrants, dit Noémie Beauvais, organisatrice communautaire au Centre des travailleuses et travailleurs immigrants (CTI).

« Quelqu’un m’appelle en détresse quasiment chaque jour », illustre Florian Freuchet, organisateur communautaire au CTI du Bas-Saint-Laurent…

Source: La bouée de sauvetage des travailleurs temporaires coule

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Why Are the Anti-Israel Chants So Tedious? » Mosaic

2024/05/03 Leave a comment

Of interest:

The anti-Israel demonstrations on American campuses have been compared to the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations of the 1960s and early 1970s. In their intensity, they may be similar. In their stupidity, they are not. Nowhere is the difference between the two protest movements more immediately apparent than in the quality and nature of the slogans used by their participants.When one considers the slogans of the anti-Vietnam War movement, one is struck by the wit and humor of many of them. Many still have the power to make one smile or laugh, such as the “Make Love, Not War” motto that probably outdid any other in its popularity. What made it so potent, yet so funny? Partly, its clever yoking together of two opposed English idioms that shared only the verb “make”; partly, its puckish suggestion that everyone, from the foot soldier in Vietnam to the president of the United States, would be better off in bed with someone else than on a battlefield or in a war-cabinet session; partly its invoking of the sexual revolution of the sixties as both the antithesis of, and the alternative to, a supposed culture of aggressive militarism; and most sweepingly, its implication that life-giving Eros and death-dealing Thanatos are different expressions of the same human libido, and that the first is preferable to the second. That’s a lot to pack into four words, but “Make Love, Not War” managed to do it.

Other anti-Vietnam War slogans were almost as memorable. Some, like “Hell, no, we won’t go [to fight in Vietnam]” were chanted at demonstrations. Two favorites that I remember were displayed on signs. One bore the iconic flower of hippiedom and the words, in a take-off of the warning recently introduced in those days on packs of cigarettes, “War Is not healthy for children and other living things.” The other, a parody of the famous World War I recruiting billboard, had a drawing of a grim-faced Uncle Sam exhorting, “Join the U.S. Army! Travel to exotic lands, meet exciting people, and kill them.” There was the stern “If you support this war, send your own children,” and the poignant “Not our sons, not your sons, not their sons.” A sign carried only by black demonstrators said, “No Vietnamese ever called me n—r.”

There were, of course, angrier and more violent anti-Vietnam War slogans, too, such as the chant “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” But these, though they spread as the war dragged on and public frustration with it mounted, were never the rule. The dominant tone was irony and sarcasm, the underlying message: “You who are prosecuting this war may be more powerful than we are, but we are smarter than you, more creative than you, and more caring for human life and human beings, and because of this, we will prevail.”

Compare this with:

  • “Red, black, green, and white, we support Hamas’s fight!.”
  • “Hitler, Hitler, go back home! Palestine is ours alone!”
  • “Globalize the intifada!”
  • “One, two, three, four, Israel will be no more! Five, six, seven, eight, Israel we’ll eliminate!”
  • “There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!”
  • “Say it loud, say it clear: we do not want Zionists here!”
  • “Oh, al-Qassam, you make us proud!  Kill another soldier now!”
  • “Resistance by any means necessary!”
  • “Palestine is our demand! No peace on stolen land!”
  • “We say justice. You say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!”
  • “We don’t want no two states. We want all of ’48!”

The sheer idiocy of such slogans is as staggering as is their hatefulness. Those who compose them seem to be under the impression that whatever rhymes is intelligent, and their ability to put two rhyming words together in what resembles a cheer for a high-school basketball team appears to be as far as their intelligence extends.

One mustn’t, of course, overgeneralize. Although many college students have joined the demonstrations, many times their number haven’t. Still, changed attitudes toward Israel aside, something has clearly happened to the minds of young American protesters between the 1960s and today. What?

Well, childhoods and adolescences dumbed down by smartphones, WhatApp, and Facebook, for one thing. And college educations given by teachers, products of the postmodernism and deconstructionism that gained ascendancy on university campuses in the last decades of the 20th century, who have taught that there is no such thing as verifiable truth or falsehood but only the competing narratives of oppressed and oppressor, and that it is incumbent to identify with the latter. And a national politics that has become one of non-debatable identities rather than of debatable issues. And the fear of saying or thinking anything that smacks of racism, sexism, genderism, religionism, elitism, nationalism, patriotism, colonialism, ethnocentrism, Orientalism, or whatever else might offend progressive values and the feelings of others, with the notable exception of those whose feelings it is permissible to offend.

None of this has been conducive to independence or subtlety of thought, let alone to irony or humor; combine it with a growing antagonism toward Israel and its Jewish supporters, now squarely placed by many young Americans in the camp of the oppressor, and you get the imbecility of “Go, Hamas, we love you! We support your rockets, too!” But whence all that rage, whence all that hate?

This is a question worth pondering. After all, the student demonstrators of the 1960s had much better reason to be consumed by such emotions (and some were) than those today. The government they were protesting against was sending them to fight, and possibly to die, in a war they considered immoral and unjust. What comparable threat does Israel, however immoral or unjust it may strike them as being, pose to students on American campuses now? What is all the screaming at it about?

The stock answer given by Israel’s supporters is: anti-Semitism. It’s hard to argue with that. When a Jewish state is vilified by mobs of students for supposed atrocities the likes of which leave them indifferent when committed by other nations, an antipathy toward Jews clearly has something to do with it.

But rampant anti-Semitism, as we know, does not spring from nowhere. It’s always an expression of some deep fear or resentment that the anti-Semite projects onto the Jew. What are today’s student demonstrators projecting that students in the 1960s were not?

Possibly, the loss of hope.

The demonstrators of the 60s were, like all rebellious young people since at least the time of the American and French Revolutions, a hopeful lot. They believed, however naively, in their power to make a better world than the one they were born into. They may have been the last generation in human history to do so. They were certainly the last in a chain going back two centuries or more, since what young person today honestly thinks life might get better in his lifetime? At most, it might be kept from not getting too much worse: too much hotter, too much more spun out of control by blind, unstoppable forces, too much more stripped of its human face by technology and artificial intelligence. The young generation’s task as the world passes into its hands will be to fight a holding action to stave off disaster, not to try creating something freer, more loving, and more joyous. If it doesn’t already know this, it surely feels it in its bones.

I would be full of anger, too, if such a world were passed on to me. Projecting such anger on a traditionally American-backed Israel that has almost nothing to do with the overall state of things is a tempting way to vent it. The more intelligent of today’s demonstrators will one day look back with embarrassment at the slogans they shouted. They will understand that they were shouting about something else.

Source: Why Are the Anti-Israel Chants So Tedious? » Mosaic

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I always thought immigrant Germans would vote against the far right. I was wrong

2024/05/03 Leave a comment

A bit naive as all immigrant groups have a range of views. That being said, AfD, like other overtly anti-immigrant and/or xenophobic politicians, are a concern:

….It pains me, but I understand where this drawbridge mentality comes from. Immigrants who have “made it” often seek to melt into the middle class by moving away from ethnic neighbourhoods, putting a distance between themselves and those who aren’t affluent or don’t speak the language. In the hierarchy of society they look up, not down. Rivalries might also play a role: I have met Russians who distrust Turks, Vietnamese who don’t like Chinese, Iranians who feel superior to Egyptians.

On X, I come across a post by one of Lambrou’s colleagues, Anna Nguyen, a second-generation Vietnamese like me, and a new member of the AfD’s parliamentary group in Hesse. Another Vietnamese-German wrote to her: “As a Vietnamese with the same last name, I feel ashamed for you. You’re blind! You’re hoping for a steep career in an inhuman party. But according to them, you and I will never be German. Wake up!” To which Nguyen replied: “I’m terribly sorry, but I didn’t realise that I wasn’t allowed to have a different political opinion.”

According to the migration researcher Naika Foroutan, social media has become a powerful tool for the AfD to target immigrant voters. She noticed that on TikTok, AfD members have begun posting videos aimed at the conservative German-Turkish community – and some influencers have picked up their message, ranting about there being “too many refugees”.

Just as not all women are feminists, not all people with immigrant heritage are fans of an open-door policy. Think of Suella Braverman, former British home secretary, Vivek Ramaswamy, a former candidate for the Republican nomination in the US and Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally in France. Do they, subconsciously, think that by slamming others into the category of “bad immigrants” they will be seen as “the good ones”? Are they trying to be overzealous nationalists because they want to demonstrate how British, American or French they really are?

….Rightwing parties have always exploited the narrative of “good” versus “bad” immigrants. Now the AfD seems to have discovered a new group of voters among immigrant Germans, some of whom seem all too willing to embrace its message and support the party. This doesn’t mean the AfD is any more tolerant, but it has become smarter, and therefore even more threatening.

  • Khuê Phạm is a German journalist and writer. Her debut novel, Brothers and Ghosts, which is inspired by her Vietnamese family, has just been released

Source: I always thought immigrant Germans would vote against the far right. I was wrong

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Nicolas | Paix sociale à la montréalaise

2024/05/03 Leave a comment

Interesting differences based on geography but the camp-in at McGill may change that:

Alors que tous les yeux sont rivés sur le campement propalestinien à McGill, j’ai envie de vous parler non pas de ce qui se passe, mais de ce qui ne se passe pas à Montréal.

Certes, l’attaque du 7 octobre contre Israël et les bombes qui n’en finissent plus de tomber sur Gaza ont élevé le niveau de tensions intercommunautaires un peu partout dans la ville. Il suffit toutefois de se comparer pour prendre la mesure de la résilience particulière du tissu social montréalais — jusqu’à présent. Il y a plusieurs pistes d’explication à ce phénomène.

D’abord, ça peut sembler étrange à dire, mais la géographie de la ville nous aide. À Toronto, plusieurs des institutions phares de la communauté juive sont en plein centre-ville, sur les grandes artères qui balisent le parcours normal des manifestations. La situation donne lieu à des moments surréels que l’on s’est épargnés ici.

Par exemple, lors d’une grande manifestation, le 12 février dernier, le Spider-Man de Toronto — un peu l’équivalent de l’Anarchopanda du printemps étudiant de Montréal — était parmi la foule à escalader les édifices le long du parcours. Une fois rendu sur la University Avenue, le personnage anonyme a grimpé sur la façade de l’hôpital Mount Sinai avant de continuer son chemin.

Des Canadiens d’origine palestinienne qui ont de la famille à Gaza ont pris la parole lors de cette manifestation, alors que l’armée israélienne annonçait vouloir se lancer dans une offensive sur Rafah. Leur message n’a pas passé. Le lendemain, toute la classe politique canadienne était en train de dénoncer… la présence de Spider-Man et de son drapeau palestinien sur un hôpital fondé par la communauté juive. Même le premier ministre Justin Trudeau a déploré sur X « cette démonstration d’antisémitisme ».

Ce n’était pas la première affaire du genre. Parce que les manifestations se retrouvent parfois en face de leurs institutions, plusieurs membres de la communauté juive de Toronto sentent qu’on manifeste contre eux, personnellement, et non contre le gouvernement d’Israël. Les organisateurs se défendent, bien sûr, d’avoir de telles intentions. Après près de sept mois de telles tensions, le dialogue social, là-bas, est devenu presque impossible.

Par « chance », à Montréal, l’Hôpital général juif n’est pas sur la rue Sherbrooke, et la plupart des écoles, des synagogues et des centres communautaires juifs de Montréal sont situés plus loin du coeur de l’action. On ne se pile pas sur les pieds de la même manière.

On a fait aussi des choix tactiques différents de ceux d’ici. Là-bas, on a manifesté à quelques reprises contre des commerces qui ont des activités dans les territoires palestiniens occupés ou qui soutiennent financièrement l’armée israélienne — et qui sont par ailleurs dirigés par des personnes juives. Alors que, d’un côté, on voit dans ces gestes une dénonciation politique de ce qui est perpétré par Israël, de l’autre, on ne voit là qu’une forme de pogrom. Là aussi, tout le monde est à cran. Plus qu’ici.

À Montréal, le plus important édifice à avoir été ciblé de la sorte est celui de Radio-Canada, qui a fait l’objet de graffitis dénonçant une « complicité avec le génocide » en novembre dernier. Le débat sur l’antisémitisme ne fait pas écran au message des manifestants de la même manière.

Je ne veux pas non plus peindre un portrait trop rose de notre situation. On se souviendra, par exemple, du discours tout à fait inacceptable prononcé par Adil Charkaoui durant la manifestation du 28 octobre dernier. Seulement, à ce point-ci, toute personne qui comprend un peu les mouvements sociaux montréalais sait que l’homme est une espèce de patate chaude opportuniste qui émerge chaque fois qu’il y a de l’action pour faire déraper le dialogue public. Personne de sérieux ne le considère comme une voix rassembleuse.

Par ailleurs, les coups de feu contre deux écoles juives de Côte-des-Neiges ont choqué la ville en novembre dernier. L’affaire a éveillé les craintes des parents, et à juste titre. Notons que des mois plus tard, aucune information ne permet d’établir l’identité ou les motifs des responsables de ces crimes haineux.

Depuis l’automne dernier, on n’a pratiquement pas entendu parler, dans les médias, de la mairesse de Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, Gracia Kasoki Katahwa. Si la réponse de son équipe aux attaques commises dans son arrondissement avait été complètement dépourvue de sensibilité, son nom serait partout. Le travail consistant à rassurer les communautés et à faire baisser la tension dans nos quartiers se fait loin des projecteurs. C’est par ce qui ne fait pas la nouvelle, parfois, qu’on peut comprendre que, même si la situation est loin d’être facile, les choses pourraient aller beaucoup, beaucoup plus mal.

Finalement, durant ces presque sept mois d’une guerre qui met bien des gens d’ici sur les nerfs, le Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) n’a presque pas fait les manchettes. Non pas parce que la police est inactive. Mais parce que des choix ont été faits, jusqu’à présent, sur la manière d’intervenir dans les manifestations et de répondre aux plaintes pour discours haineux antisémite, antipalestinien ou islamophobe. Quand on ne parle pratiquement pas du SPVM, bien qu’on marche à Montréal semaine après semaine, c’est que, là aussi, ça pourrait aller beaucoup plus mal que ça ne va jusqu’à présent.

Cette relative paix sociale montréalaise qui subsiste malgré tout dans le contexte — j’insiste sur le mot « relative » —, elle est précieuse. Et très fragile. Les décisions du SPVM, de nos tribunaux et de l’administration de l’Université McGill cette semaine pourraient nous rapprocher du niveau de tension qui mine la plupart des grandes villes nord-américaines.

Aujourd’hui, Montréal peut décider d’asseoir fièrement sa différence, ou de l’effacer. La métropole peut se rapprocher de Toronto ou de New York, ou faire les choses à sa manière. Dans les jours, voire les heures qui suivent, son leadership choisira.

Source: Chronique | Paix sociale à la montréalaise

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Jonathan Kay: Just ignore Sarah Jama’s keffiyeh. Next she’ll be wearing a turban, Kaveh Shahrooz: The Queen’s Park keffiyeh kerfuffle proves the wisdom of keeping political symbols out of the legislature

2024/05/03 Leave a comment

Two contrasting views on the right, starting with Kay:

…If legislators at work are to be governed by a rule that forbids political symbols, then that category should be defined narrowly — which means permitting any symbol, such as a keffiyeh, whose use doesn’t necessarily convey a political meaning. In a liberal society, it is much more important to guard against false positives than false negatives when defining classes of banned expression. And Jama’s antics shouldn’t be seized upon as an excuse to err in an illiberal direction.

One reason I’m wary of any kind of keffiyeh ban is that we’re just coming out of a period of progressive social panic in Canada, during which even the mildest articulation of conservative viewpoints, or display of traditional Canadian symbols, was denounced as a “dog whistle” for white supremacy or some such. (To take one particularly ludicrous example: Recall that in 2022, an “anti-racist” group got a six-figure grant from Justin Trudeau’s government so it could author a report denouncing the Red Ensign flag — Canada’s national symbol until about 60 years ago — as a coded endorsement of white supremacism.) We’re all sick of this type of phobic mindset being displayed on the left, and I’m wary of conservatives copying the worst habits of their enemies now that the cultural tide is starting to turn.

One of those bad habits is catastrophizing. When I first mentioned on social media that I thought Jama should get her way on the keffiyeh issue, I got a chorus of pushback to the effect that she was channelling antisemitism — because what else except Jew-hatred would motivate anyone to take up the keffiyeh in the shadow of 10/7? To allow her to continue dressing in this way, the claim goes, is to make Jews across Ontario feel unsafe.

But I doubt that Jama is any kind of true bigot (even if the stridency of her anti-Israeli statements raises the possibility). What seems more likely is that she’s one of those serial activists whose focus will flit from cause to cause over the years, based on what’s in the news and what brings out the cameras. Once Gaza cools down and other conflicts take centre stage, who knows? We may see Sarah Jama in a turban, or a Ukrainian vyshyvanka, or perhaps even some kind of fez.

Whatever adornments Jama chooses, the best course is to simply ignore them, and leave it to Hamilton Centre voters to assess her wardrobe choices in the next election.

Source: Jonathan Kay: Just ignore Sarah Jama’s keffiyeh. Next she’ll be wearing a turban

Contrary view by Kaveh Shahrooz:

…The legislature holds a unique place in our polity and should aspire to more. While it should serve as the forum for political disagreement and debate, it should not itself be seen as partisan. And it should elevate our public discourse, instead of becoming yet another force that reduces nuanced topics to signs, pins, stickers, and placards. 

Opposing the keffiyeh for its alleged bad meaning naturally draws out the battle over that meaning, and invites another battle over the freedom of expression. It also invites future fights about the meaning of every other symbol that MPPs will hereinafter try to bring into the legislature. Is the Ukraine pin a good or bad symbol? The Black Lives Matter badge? What about the MAGA hat? Open this door just a little and we will be mired in a thousand battles about a thousand causes, logos, and signs.

The solution, then, is not to engage in a futile line-drawing exercise which will leave many stakeholders unhappy much of the time. Instead, it is to maintain the existing nearly blanket ban on political symbols. (I say “nearly blanket” because symbols like the Remembrance Day poppy are now permitted at Queen’s Park. But even that required a special exemption.) The ban avoids the problem altogether, allowing our core deliberative body to remain a place for reason above passion. 

We will likely never agree on the precise meaning of the keffiyeh (though we should at least strive to be honest in its interpretation; something the “it’s just a cultural symbol” crowd is not doing.) 

But we should agree that some corners of our society should be reserved for deliberation and debate instead of cheap appeals to emotion and tribalism. What better place for that than Queen’s Park?

Source: Kaveh Shahrooz: The Queen’s Park keffiyeh kerfuffle proves the wisdom of keeping political symbols out of the legislature

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