Guardian Debate on Islamophobia and antisemitism: Mehdi Hassan and Jonathan Freedland
2014/10/06 Leave a comment
Two short video extracts from the 15 September Guardian debate, both adding nuance and understanding to the issues:
U.S. Is Trying to Counter ISIS’ Efforts to Lure Alienated Young Muslims – NYTimes.com
2014/10/06 Leave a comment
Good piece in the NY Times about US Government efforts to engage American Muslims in countering extremism, with some of the same issues that likely arise in Canada. The last line captures the conundrum:
American officials have been able to identify Americans fighting for the Islamic State or other Syrian rebel groups based on intelligence gathered from travel records, family members, intercepted electronic communications, social media postings and surveillance of Americans overseas who had expressed interest in going to Syria, counterterrorism officials said.
But efforts at countering violent extremism, especially at home, “have lagged badly behind other counterterrorism pillars,” said Michael Leiter, a former director of the National Counterterrorism Center. “It is heartening to see the administration attempt to invigorate those efforts, but it is unfortunate that it has, despite the efforts of many, been so long in coming.”
Government supporters question whether funds will be available to sustain these programs. “The administration has the right framework for doing this, but long-term success will depend on sustainable resourcing to help local government, communities and law enforcement build initiatives that can have impact,” said Quintan Wiktorowicz, a former senior White House aide who was one of the principal architects of the current strategy.
That strategy here at home, called countering violent extremism, has proved much more difficult for American officials to master than the ability of the Pentagon and spy agencies to identify, track, capture and, if necessary, kill terrorists overseas.
Among its efforts, the Department of Homeland Security provides training to help state and local law enforcement officials in identifying and countering the threat, including indicators of violent extremism and “lone wolf” attacks.
The department awarded the International Association of Chiefs of Police a $700,000 grant last year to develop training on how to prevent, respond to and recover from acts of terrorism.
The department has also sponsored exercises in seven cities, including Houston, Seattle, and Durham, N.C., to improve communication between local law enforcement and communities and to share ideas on how best to build community resilience against violent extremism. “We’re raising awareness,” said David Gersten, who was recently named the department’s coordinator for the overall effort.
Carter M. Stewart, the United States attorney in the Columbus area, said he and his staff meet regularly with Somali-American and other community leaders.
But Muslim advocates say there is deep suspicion that, despite all the meetings and the talk of outreach, the government’s main goal is to recruit informants to root out suspected terrorists.
“I don’t know how we can have a partnership with the same government that spies on you,” said Linda Sarsour, advocacy director for the National Network for Arab American Communities.
Indeed, those who met with Mr. Johnson were conflicted, some saying they were pleasantly surprised he had traveled here to put a face on the federal effort, but clearly embittered by their past experiences with the government.
Dr. Iyad Azrak, 37, a Syrian-American ophthalmologist, recounted how he and his family had been forced on numerous trips to Canada to wait for hours at border crossings while inspectors reviewed his records.
“Not once when we’re coming home do they say to me, ‘Welcome home,’ ” said Dr. Azrak, who said he has been a naturalized citizen for six years.
U.S. Is Trying to Counter ISIS’ Efforts to Lure Alienated Young Muslims – NYTimes.com.
Winnipeg man could be test case for Canada’s latest tool in fight against terrorism: revoking citizenship
2014/10/06 Leave a comment
A likely test case given Hiva Mohammad Alizadeh, a dual Iranian-Canadian national, pleaded guilty in Canadian courts (Hiva Alizadeh — arrested in Project Samosa — pleads guilty to terror plot):
Both the NDP and Liberals oppose the legislation, known as C-24. In a June 25 letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair wrote that the case of Mohamed Fahmy, a Canadian-Egyptian Al Jazeera journalist imprisoned in Egypt, illustrated the dangers of the law’s reliance on the decisions of foreign courts.
John McCallum, the Liberal immigration critic, said he was also concerned that the judgments of foreign courts could influence Canada’s decision to revoke citizenship, arguing the term terrorism was used “extremely loosely” against government opponents in countries like Sri Lanka.
The safeguards built into the law are also weak, he said, and it creates two classes of Canadians — those who hold dual nationality and those who don’t. “We think a Canadian is a Canadian and we should not have two classes of Canadians, some of whom could be deported and have their citizenship taken away.”
Neither was he convinced that deporting terrorists was a sound national security strategy. “If you’re serious about stopping them from killing people, you want to put them in jail, you don’t want to deport them to a place where they could go on killing.”
In a recent interview, Chris Alexander, the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, said the law “sends a very clear message already to those who have grown up here or immigrated here who think it’s just natural that they should be able to go as Canadian citizens with their Canadian passport off to a theatre of war like Syria and join a barbaric group like Daesh,” another name for ISIS.
“No one, however misguided, can be in any doubt now about whether that kind of move should be taken lightly. It shouldn’t be. It’s a serious crime,” he said. “Where there is a conviction and it’s a dual national, you will lose your citizenship.”
He would not comment on which or how many cases were under consideration, saying it was “early days” and procedures were still being put into place. “I hope there’s early action under this provision, but I can’t give you firm timelines,” he said.
But during a meeting Tuesday with U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, Public Safety Minister Stephen Blaney “highlighted the Government of Canada’s determination to revoke citizenship from dual nationals found guilty of terrorism,” according to the Prime Minister’s Office.
Saudi overhaul reshapes Islam’s holiest city Mecca – Business – The Boston Globe
2014/10/04 Leave a comment
A rather polite article on how the history of Mecca and Muslims is being re-written by the Saudi government:
Overseeing Mecca is also a key source of prestige for Saudi Arabia’s monarchy. The past two kings — the current one, Abdullah, and his predecessor, Fahd — have adopted the further title of ‘‘custodian of the two holy mosques’’ to boost their status, referring to Mecca’s Grand Mosque and Muhammad’s mosque in nearby Medina.
Now Mecca is being molded to a particularly Saudi vision that bolsters the rule of the Saud royal family.
Two forces shape that vision. One is raw, petrodollar-fueled capitalism. Mecca’s planners are largely catering to wealthier pilgrims by constructing five-star hotels, surrounding the Kaaba in marble-sheathed luxury. Nearby, pilgrims can shop at international chains, including a Paris Hilton store and a gender-segregated Starbucks.
The other force is Wahhabism, the strict, puritanical interpretation of Islam that the Saud rulers elevated to the country’s official doctrine. Saudi kings, for example, have given Wahhabi clerics a monopoly over preaching at the Grand Mosque. In return, the clerics staunchly back the monarchy.
One tenet of Wahhabism is that Muslim tombs or sites connected to revered figures — even the Prophet Muhammad, his family, and companions — should be destroyed to avoid veneration of anything other than God. It is the same iconoclastic zeal that has prompted militants from the Islamic State group to blow up Muslim shrines in Iraq and Syria.
In Mecca, few sites associated with Muhammad remain. Many were destroyed in previous expansions of the Grand Mosque in the 1980s and 1990s, and the new development is finishing off much of what remains. In 2008, the house of Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s successor as leader of the Muslim community, was razed to make way for a Hilton.
Saudi overhaul reshapes Islam’s holiest city Mecca – Business – The Boston Globe.
Who Votes in Toronto Municipal Elections? – Maytree Study
2014/10/04 Leave a comment
Summary of the results of the Maytree study by Ryerson University Professor Myer Siemiatycki on Toronto municipal voting:
Toronto has a poor record of voter participation in civic elections. In 42 of Toronto’s 44 wards less than half of all eligible voters cast a ballot in recent city elections. The turnout improves only when elections are hotly contested. While areas with lower voter turnout typically have high concentrations of immigrant and visible minority populations, there is minimal correlation between voting and an area’s average income, and no correlation to an area’s proportion of tenants and homeowners.
These are some of the key findings of Who Votes in Toronto Municipal Elections?, the first such study on voter turnout over the past three municipal elections in 2003, 2006 and 2010. Conducted for Maytree by Ryerson University Professor Myer Siemiatycki and geographic analyst Sean Marshall, the study explored the connection between municipal voting behaviour and some of Toronto’s prime demographic characteristics like immigrant status, visible minority identity, income and home ownership.
There is some good news
While the poor turnout is cause for concern, the study shows there is nothing inevitable or pre-determined about who votes in municipal elections. Thorncliffe Park is a prime example of what can be achieved if a more diverse political leadership results in deeper community engagement. With a large concentration of immigrants and visible minorities, this inner city area is one of Toronto’s highest voting neighbourhoods.
Why voter turnout matters
There are many reasons to take the democratic deficit arising out of poor voter turnout seriously. It threatens the legitimacy and confidence of local government and risks local officials being out of touch with public needs and concerns. It can lead to areas or communities within the city being marginalized from public decision-making.
France And Jews, Then And Now « The Dish
2014/10/04 Leave a comment
French journalist Ann Sinclair on the situation of French Jews and how the explanation for why more of them are leaving may also have economic reasons, like other French citizens, not just fears of increased antisemitism:
[M]ore French Jews are making aliyah to Israel in 2014 than ever before. The reasons for their departure, of course, are complex, and not easily explained by the desire to escape an anti-Semitic environment. But the fact remains that more than 2,000 Jews have left France, compared with only 580 from the same period last year. “There’s been a lot of fuss everywhere about that,” says Sinclair, “and it’s not always accurate. … I’m concerned, of course, by the anti-Semitic revival. There is one. Not only in France, in Europe, everywhere.”
“And,” she adds, “there’s a new anti-Semitism, which is not one of the ’30s or the ’40s, which is more related to the conflict in the Middle East. In some suburbs in France you have people coming even in the third generation from the Maghreb, who are living in very bad conditions, and they feel they are rejected, well, by the whole community. … This sense of being rejected is a social despair, which can mutate into anti-Semitism when they want to protest for something.”
“But don’t believe that the French Jews are fleeing—it’s absolutely untrue,” she said, emphasizing the complicated nature of the statistics often used in the reports. French Jews may be leaving France in greater numbers than before, but so have many other French citizens, seeking friendlier business climates and lower tax rates overseas.
Jonathan Kay: On El Al’s planes, a case study in appalling sexism
2014/10/03 Leave a comment
Jon Kay, continuing on an earlier theme against the Haredim (Jonathan Kay: Shariah with a Jewish face | National Post):
Of course, stories of Haredi sexual segregation of have been coming out of Israel for years now. In a move that would make Saudi Arabia proud, some Israeli communities even have sex-segregated busses. And some ultraorthodox communities practice a disgusting mouth-to-penis circumcision practice called Metzitza B’peh, which would be the subject of child-sex abuse charges here in North America if Muslims were doing it. Israeli society shouldn’t stand for such deplorable practices, but ultimately that is Israel’s business.
El Al, on the other hand, is a company that uses Canadian airports and flies hundreds of Canadian passengers to and from Israel every day. Putting aside the question of whether the episodes described above violate Canadian human-rights law, how does it look for Israel’s national flagship carrier to put on display, in front of rows of horrified passengers, the poisonous prejudices of the most narrow-minded constituency in Israeli society?
We are always told (by Stephen Harper and Benjamin Netanyahu alike) that Israel is a beacon of progressive thought, democracy and pluralism in a Middle East brimming with repressive, retrograde attitudes. And in general, that is true. But it seems to me like Elana Sztokman can be forgiven for feeling otherwise.
Jonathan Kay: On El Al’s planes, a case study in appalling sexism
Roger Cohen Sees Hitler In The Desert « The Dish
2014/10/03 Leave a comment
The debate between Andrew Sullivan and Roger Cohen, starting with Sullivan:
Well, we all see mirages, I guess. But it says something about the hysteria about the latest incarnation of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq that we’re suddenly comparing them to Nazis and to non-humans. Even as Cohen himself acknowledges that “the Nazi death machine was unique. Facile invocation of it is too frequent, belittling the phenomenon and its victims.
”So why break Godwin’s Law so egregiously? Cohen wants us to believe, channeling Martin Amis and Primo Levi, that there was no “why” in the unconscionable unique act of the Holocaust.
And yet, mountains of evidence explain exactly why: it was a function of a vile racism that regarded the Jewish people as vermin that needed to be exterminated in order to allow the master race to flourish. It was not some random act of mass murder; it had a grotesque but clear and constantly trumpeted rationale. Then Cohen seems to endorse the idea that the Nazis were somehow unhumans or “counter-humans”, in Levi’s words. But that too, it seems to me, lets them off the hook. The Holocaust was a deeply human act – a function of humankind’s capacity, revealed throughout history, of extraordinary levels of hatred and violence, brought to new and unfathomable evil in the age of the industrialized state.
And equally, it is absurd to argue that “there is no why to the barbarism of ISIS.”This is after Cohen actually produces a long litany of reasons for ISIS’s brutality and evil, mind you, none of which he deems sufficient to explain the ISIS propaganda beheadings he watched on video. But why should we not take the Islamists’ word for it? They are committing slaughter and rape and attempted genocide for one core reason: because God demands that they slaughter infidels. Their mandate is beyond any human one but results in so-very-human evil.
Roger Cohen Sees Hitler In The Desert « The Dish.
From Cohen:
It is human to seek for reasons. Perhaps the rise of ISIS may be seen as the culmination of decades of Arab resentment at perceived Western domination, drawing support from the same anger as the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda before it; or as an expression of the abject failure of Arab societies; or as an armed Sunni response to the Shia-bolstering American invasion of Iraq; or as brutal payback for Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo (where, it must be said, there was scant “why” for prisoners detained for years and guilty of no crime); or as a well-funded offshoot of Saudi Wahhabism interpreted in its most literal form; or as a heady alternative for disaffected young Muslims to the moral void of Western civilization; or as evidence of the crisis of Islam and the inevitable Thirty Years War of its Sunni and Shia branches; or simply as a call to arms to drive out the United States the way the infidel Crusaders were ousted from the Levant.
Yet, in the end, there is no why to the barbarism of ISIS. There is no why in Raqqa. Evil may adduce reasons; they fall short. The Nazi death machine was unique. Facile invocation of it is too frequent, belittling the phenomenon and its victims. But I was given pause by Martin Amis’ afterword to his powerful new novel, The Zone of Interest, where he probes the “why” of Hitler and quotes both the icicle passage and another from Levi:
“Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify. Let me explain: ‘Understanding’ a proposal or human behavior means to ‘contain’ it, contain its author, put oneself in his place, identify with him.” Levi, referring to Hitler, Himmler and the rest, goes on: “Perhaps it is desirable that their words (and also, unfortunately, their deeds) cannot be comprehensible to us. They are non-human words and deeds, really counter-human.”
New Chinese centre to encourage multiculturalism, AsiaOne Singapore News
2014/10/03 Leave a comment
From Singapore which has traditionally, if memory serves me correctly, had a fairly active approach to managing relations among the various communities, including parallel institutions and where people live.
Appreciate any comments either confirming or correcting.
But some signs of more integration as we would understand it:
Performances at the upcoming Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre in Shenton Way will include collaborations with non-Chinese arts groups, said its chief executive Choo Thiam Siew.
For instance, non-Chinese musicians could be invited to play for say, a Chinese dance, he said, adding: “Chinese flautists already play together with Indian tabla musicians.”
Mr Choo was elaborating on the vision that the centres chairman Chua Thian Poh outlined at the buildings ground-breaking ceremony yesterday. The event was officiated by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who is the centres patron.
The 11-storey centre, Mr Chua said, will “encourage integration among all races in Singapore”.
New Chinese centre to encourage multiculturalism, AsiaOne Singapore News.
Multiculturalism in Canada: Evidence and Anecdote
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