Salman Rushdie Weighs In on Death Threats Against Taylor Swift Critic

2024/04/25 Leave a comment

Worth reading. Money quote: People have to stop having such thin skins.”:

Jon Stewart seemed a bit sheepish when he asked famed author Salman Rushdie, a victim of murder attempts on account of his novel Satanic Verses, to weigh in on Paste’s byline-less Taylor Swift critique this week on The Daily Show, after the site chose to publish their scathing review of the singer’s latest album anonymously due to death threats sent to the writer of their previous Swift critique.

Rushdie was violently attacked and stabbed 15 times in 2022 while giving a lecture in western New York. The acclaimed author was 75 at the time and narrowly escaped with his life. His assailant was motivated by an order for Rushdie’s death by Iran’s leader in the 1980s, who deemed Rushdie’s novel Satanic Verses blasphemous. That assailant later admitted to only reading “a couple pages” of the novel before attacking him.

After experiencing the violence someone can be driven to based even on the smallest tidbit of information, Rushdie seemed to Stewart a good person to ask about our current climate, in which a music critic has to publish their work without their name. As Paste stated at the time, “We care more about the safety of our staff than a name attached to an article.”

“There was a critic—and this is gonna sound like a joke—a critic of Taylor Swift’s new music album, The Tortured Poets Department, they had to remove the critic’s name from the critique because of death threats,” Stewart told Rushdie on The Daily Show Monday night.

“Because he didn’t like the record?” Rushdie asked in disbelief.

“Everybody’s so angry right now, that nobody can listen or talk to anybody else,” he added. “Everybody’s an expert, everybody’s got an opinion, and hostility. The level of anger is crazy right now.”

Rushdie said that though he doesn’t have the “answer to the world’s problems,” he has a few theories about why people seem to be resorting to violence more often over the simplest of disagreements—such as whether Swift’s album was good or bad. “People have always disagreed and people have always said, ‘You can’t say that, you’ve got to say this.’ That’s not new,” he said.

“What’s happened [now] is the temperature has risen,” Rushdie continued. “What’s new is the volume and the heat—so what do we do about taking down the volume and taking down the heat, that’s the question.”

The writer added that the level of violence and anger we’re seeing now has to do with a society in which “we’re all very easily offended,” adding, “People have to stop having such thin skins.”

“What’s more is we also believe that being offended is a sufficient reason for attacking something—but actually, everything offends somebody, always,” Rushdie said, adding that the future under this kind of thinking doesn’t look good because, “If you go down that road, then we can’t talk to each other anymore.”

He also gave Stewart an update on how life has been since the attack on his life nearly two years ago. “It did certainly have an impact [on me],” he said. “I actually got my life back really, I’ve been living in New York City for 25 years,” after those initial 80s death threats. “For 23 years it was fine. I was doing everything that writers do, book tours, lectures,” he said, “It was a shock when this thing out of a quarter of a century ago, more than that, 30 years ago, sort of came out of a crowd at me.”

Despite the incident’s impact, Rushdie said, “It’s now been around 20 months [ago], I feel like I’m pretty much back to myself I think.”

Source: Salman Rushdie Weighs In on Death Threats Against Taylor Swift Critic

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What Was Revealed When British Officials Calculated How Much a Colonial Subject’s Life Was Worth

2024/04/25 Leave a comment

A reminder:

One hundred and five years ago, in April 1919, Mani Ram, a middle-aged dental surgeon, frantically ran to one of his son’s favorite play areas. His son, Madan Mohan, enjoyed playing at Jallianwalla Bagh, an empty plot of land in the center of Amritsar, Punjab, but had not come home. Mani Ram was worried because British officer General Reginald Dyer had just ordered his troops to cordon off Jallianwalla Bagh and open fire on all Indian subjects without warning. His officers fired 1,650 bullets at Indians, killing and injuring hundreds, including children at play.

Mani Ram found his son’s lifeless body, among hundreds of others at Jallianwalla Bagh, and carried it home.

Two years later, Mani Ram filed a claim with the imperial government for compensation for the loss of his son. The colonial government had long provided compensation payments to European families when their property was destroyed, or family members were injured or killed. For example, the British government compensated British Loyalists after the American Revolution, British enslavers after the abolition of slavery, and British subjects in India after a large wave of rebellions in 1857.

But 1921 was likely the first and only large-scale compensation for Indian families under British imperial control. British officials were adamant that the payments did not set a precedent and were eager to make them discreetly, burying the procedure, at times, in misclassified files in the archive. These files across London, Delhi, and Chandigarh show a deep racialized and gendered disparity in the value attributed to Indian and European lives, as well as the care distributed to their surviving family members or maimed subjects making such claims. Today, practices of compensation and reparations are still sorted through similar legal structures that echo those very racial disparities.

Dyer’s instruction to shoot Indians at Jallianwalla Bagh was not the only form of imperial violence Indian subjects experienced in 1919. In the early months of 1919, Indians had assembled to protest draconian British policies such as the Rowlatt Act, which granted British officials emergency powers to detain Indian subjects indefinitely without any opportunity for judicial review. In protest, some Indians resorted to attacking the colonial government’s infrastructure, such as railway lines, telegraph wires, and local banks.

British officials responded with great force. They caned, flogged, and detained Indian men and male children without warrant. British officials also declared martial law and opened fire on protesting Indians in Delhi, Bombay, Lahore, Amritsar, Kasur, and Gujrat. British pilots also air bombed parts of Gujranwala.

In the aftermath of the violence, local district magistrates utilized their discretion to allocate ₹523,571 to widows and children of five Europeans who lost their lives in Amritsar and Kasur, as well as to Europeans who were injured, shocked, or attacked during the protests. The compensation funds came from taxes and indemnities leveraged on Indians rather than British funds.

In stark contrast, state officials “distribut[ed] quietly” a sum of ₹14,050 to a handful of Indian subjects “through confidential enquiries,” fearing they should offer at least some reprieve for Indian subjects. Imperial officials hoped that this covert distribution of payments would discourage new requests and limit any precedents for compensation for state violence in the future. Most Indian families who suffered death or injury received no compensation. Those few families who did receive payment received low sums, far less than their European counterparts, and had to rebuild their lives with few resources.

The racial disparity in payments reflected the significant difference in the value placed on a European life compared to that of an Indian, with the former being valued at almost 200 times higher.

Facing global criticism for the violence in 1919, British officials in London instructed the central government in Delhi to investigate the actions of its British officers against Indians while simultaneously guaranteeing amnesty for all imperial officers. In 1920, a committee, mandated by the India Office and Government of India, delivered its final report on the wide array of violence used against Indian subjects. The committee’s four European members justified the widespread violence and brutal tactics employed by British officers in Punjab, while its three Indian members fervently disagreed.

The Government of India argued that its officers were legally permitted to use violence in all situations, including whipping, caning, forced crawling, and indefinite detainment, with only two exceptions. The first exception was Jallianwalla Bagh, where Dyer had ordered troops to fire on the gathering of Indians. The second exception was Gujranwala, a Punjabi locality where British pilots dropped bombs on colonial subjects from planes without warning.

Over the following months, Indian legislators became aware of the significant difference in compensation payments between Indians and Europeans in 1919. They demanded equal compensation for Indian families, political reforms, and an official statement of regret from the British government.

While British officials refused to issue a statement or implement substantial political reforms, they reluctantly approved limited compensation for Indians. However, they restricted the scope and amount of these payments. The decision was driven more by concerns for political stability in colonial India and Punjab than by any commitment to racial equality or justice.

Over the next two years, the Government of India and Punjab worked together to establish a compensation process for Punjabi families who had lost family members or were maimed at Jallianwalla Bagh and Gujranwala. Although the government encouraged families to come forward and file claims, many hesitated due to fears that the compensation process was merely a ploy by the imperial government to target the family members of Indians who were involved in the protests during the early months of 1919.

To determine the value of a person’s life, the Compensation Committee was instructed to utilize a method similar to actuarial science. This involved considering the individual’s annual income or projected income, as well as their life expectancy. After deducting one share for the deceased individual, the remaining payment was divided among his dependents. This process was much more limited in its scope compared to the compensation claims of European subjects in 1919.

The colonial government initially failed to include provisions for Indian women and children, believing their lives had little to no economic impact or worth to the livelihoods of families. Officials eventually agreed to assign a fixed nominal amount to account for their lives. In contrast, calculations for European women in 1919 not only considered life expectancy and annual income, but also took into account nearly all injuries and trauma they experienced.

The formal process of compensation implemented by the imperial government sometimes exacerbated the trauma experienced by Indian subjects. The Compensation Committee asked Mani Ram what the value of his 10-year-old son was. Mani Ram testified that his son was an intelligent student with ambitions that could have led him to achieve any position within the government, even that of a governor. The details of the subsequent conversation between colonial officials and Mani Ram are unknown, but we know that Mani Ram pleaded with the government not to “add insult to injury.”

The allocation given to Indians reflected the significant racial inequality that the imperial government placed on the value of its subjects’ lives. After completing their work, the Viceroy’s Council provided ₹226,000 to over 700 Indian individuals as compensation for the excessive violence inflicted by the colonial government in 1919. This sum, supported through funds collected from indemnities, fines, and taxes imposed on Indians, was less than half of what was distributed among almost a dozen European subjects.

This history, carefully uncovered from governmental records, provides us with a deeper understanding of the past, particularly how legal procedures and bureaucratic systems supported British imperial rule and marginalized the value of Indian claims and lives. But this history is also significant in our present time, as it sheds light on modern practices of compensation as demands for restitution, reparations, and reparative justice, continue.

Hardeep Dhillon is an educator and historian at the University of Pennsylvania. She recently authored “Imperial Violence, Law, and Compensation in the Age of Empire, 1919–1922,” which is open access to all readers through The Historical Journal.

Source: What Was Revealed When British Officials Calculated How Much a Colonial Subject’s Life Was Worth

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Why Did Modi Call India’s Muslims ‘Infiltrators’? Because He Could.

2024/04/24 Leave a comment

Sigh….

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his power at home secured and his Hindu-first vision deeply entrenched, has set his sights in recent years on a role as a global statesman, riding India’s economic and diplomatic rise. In doing so, he has distanced himself from his party’s staple work of polarizing India’s diverse population along religious lines for its own electoral gain.

His silence provided tacit backing as vigilante groups continued to target non-Hindu minority groups and as members of his party routinely used hateful and racist language, even in Parliament, against the largest of those groups, India’s 200 million Muslims. With the pot kept boiling, Mr. Modi’s subtle dog whistles — with references to Muslim dress or burial places — could go a long way domestically while providing enough deniability to ensure that red carpets remained rolled out abroad for the man leading the world’s largest democracy.

Just what drove the prime minister to break with this calculated pattern in a fiery campaign speech on Sunday — when he referred to Muslims by name as “infiltrators” with “more children” who would get India’s wealth if his opponents took power — has been hotly debated. It could be a sign of anxiety that his standing with voters is not as firm as believed, analysts said. Or it could be just a reflexive expression of the kind of divisive religious ideology that has fueled his politics from the start.

But the brazenness made clear that Mr. Modi sees few checks on his enormous power. At home, watchdog institutions have been largely bent to the will of his Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P. Abroad, partners increasingly turn a blind eye to what Mr. Modi is doing in India as they embrace the country as a democratic counterweight to China.

“Modi is one of the world’s most skilled and experienced politicians,” said Daniel Markey, a senior adviser in the South Asia program at the United States Institute of Peace. “He would not have made these comments unless he believed he could get away with it.”

Mr. Modi may have been trying to demonstrate this impunity, Mr. Markey said, “to intimidate the B.J.P.’s political opponents and to show them — and their supporters — just how little they can do in response.”…

Source: Why Did Modi Call India’s Muslims ‘Infiltrators’? Because He Could.

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Chicago’s response to migrant influx stirs long-standing frustrations among its Blacks – Voice of America

2024/04/24 Leave a comment

Of note:

The closure of Wadsworth Elementary School in 2013 was a blow to residents of the majority-Black neighborhood it served, symbolizing a city indifferent to their interests.

So when the city reopened Wadsworth last year to shelter hundreds of migrants without seeking community input, it added insult to injury. Across Chicago, Black residents are frustrated that long-standing needs are not being met while the city’s newly arrived are cared for with a sense of urgency, and with their tax dollars.

“Our voices are not valued nor heard,” said Genesis Young, a lifelong Chicagoan who lives near Wadsworth.

Chicago is one of several big American cities grappling with a surge of migrants. The Republican governor of Texas has been sending them by the busload to highlight his grievances with the Biden administration’s immigration policy.

To manage the influx, Chicago has already spent more than $300 million of city, state and federal funds to provide housing, health care, education and more to over 38,000 mostly South American migrants who have arrived in the city since 2022, desperate for help. The speed with which these funds were marshaled has stirred widespread resentment among Black Chicagoans.

But community leaders are trying to ease racial tensions and channel the public’s frustrations into agitating for the greater good.

Political reactions

The outcry over migrants in Chicago and other large Democrat-led cities is having wider implications in an election year: The Biden administration is now advocating a more restrictive approach to immigration in its negotiations with Republicans in Congress.

Since the Wadsworth building reopened as a shelter, Young has felt “extreme anxiety” because of the noise, loitering and around-the-clock police presence that came with it. More than anything, she and other neighbors say it is a reminder of problems that have been left unsolved for years, including high rates of crime, unemployment and homelessness.

“I definitely don’t want to seem insensitive to them and them wanting a better life. However, if you can all of a sudden come up with all these millions of dollars to address their housing, why didn’t you address the homeless issue here?” said Charlotte Jackson, the owner of a bakery and restaurant in the South Loop neighborhood.

“For so long we accepted that this is how things had to be in our communities,” said Chris Jackson, who co-founded the bakery with his wife. “This migrant crisis has made many people go: ‘Wait a minute, no it doesn’t.’ ”

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson declined to comment for this story.

The city received more than $200 million from the state and federal governments to help care for migrants after Johnson appealed to Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and President Joe Biden. The president will be in Chicago in August to make his reelection pitch at the 2024 Democratic National Convention.

Some see opportunity

Some Black Chicagoans are protesting the placement of shelters in their neighborhoods, but others aim to turn the adversity into an opportunity.

“Chicago is a microcosm to the rest of the nation,” said the Reverend Janette C. Wilson, national executive director of the civil rights group PUSH for Excellence. Black communities have faced discrimination and underinvestment for decades and are justifiably frustrated, Wilson said. The attention the migrants are receiving is deserved, she added, but it’s also a chance for cities to reflect on their responsibility to all underserved communities.

“There is a moral imperative to take care of everybody,” Wilson said.

After nearly two years of acrimony, the city has begun to curb some accommodations for migrants – which has caused its own backlash. The city last month started evicting migrants who overstayed a 60-day limit at shelters, prompting condemnation from immigrant rights groups and from residents worried about public safety.

Marlita Ingram, a school guidance counselor who lives in the South Shore neighborhood, said she was concerned about the resources being shared “equitably” between migrants and longtime residents. But she said she also believed that “it doesn’t have to be a competition” and sympathized with the nearly 6,000 migrant children now enrolled in Chicago’s public schools.

As the potential for racial strife rises, some activists are pointing to history as a cautionary tale.

Hundreds of thousands of Black Southerners moved to Chicago in the early 20th century in search of greater freedoms and economic opportunities. White Chicagoans at the time accused them of receiving disproportionate resources from the city, and in 1919 tensions boiled over.

In a surge of racist attacks in cities across the U.S. that came to be known as “Red Summer,” white residents burned large swaths of Chicago’s Black neighborhoods and killed 38 Black people, including by lynching.

“Those white folks were, like, ‘Hell, no, they’re coming here, they’re taking our jobs,’ ” said Richard Wallace, founder of Equity and Transformation, a majority-Black community group that co-hosted a forum in March to improve dialogue between Black and Latino residents.

Echoes of past

He hears echoes of that past bigotry — intentional or not — when Black Chicagoans complain about the help being given to migrants. “How did we become like the white folks who were resisting our people coming to the city of the Chicago?” he said.

Labor and immigrant rights organizers have worked for years to tamp down divisions among working class communities. But the migrant crisis has created tensions between the city’s large Mexican American community and recently arrived migrants, many of whom hail from Venezuela.

“If left unchecked, we all panic, we’re all scared, we’re going to retreat to our corners,” said Leone Jose Bicchieri, executive director of Working Family Solidarity, a majority-Hispanic labor rights group. “The truth is that this city wouldn’t work without Black and Latino people.”

Black Americans’ views on immigration and diversity are expansive. The Civil Rights Movement was instrumental in pushing the U.S. to adopt a more inclusive immigration policy.

About half of Black Americans say the United States’ diverse population makes the country strong, including 30% who say it makes the U.S. “much stronger,” according to a March poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Many leaders in Black neighborhoods in and around Chicago are trying to acknowledge the tensions without exacerbating them.

“Our church is divided on the migrant crisis,” said the Reverend Chauncey Brown, pastor of Second Baptist Church in Maywood, Illinois, a majority-Black suburb of Chicago where some migrants are living in shelters.

There has been a noticeable uptick of non-English speakers in the pews, many of whom have said they are migrants in need of food and other services, Brown said. Some church members cautioned him against speaking out in support of migrants or allotting more church resources to them. But he said the Bible’s teachings are clear on this issue.

“When a stranger enters your land, you are to care for them as if they are one of your own,” he said.

Source: Chicago’s response to migrant influx stirs long-standing frustrations among its Blacks – Voice of America

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David | Le multiculturalisme financier, Clark: The Bloc’s fake freakout over halal mortgages is ridiculous

2024/04/24 Leave a comment

Starting with on cue, commentary in Le Devoir and Bloc “outrage” in Parliament:

Paul St-Pierre Plamondon a sans doute péché par anachronisme quand il a dénoncé « une action concertée pour nous effacer ». En revanche, il faut reconnaître au gouvernement Trudeau un remarquable talent pour la provocation.

Après son offensive prébudgétaire dans les champs de compétence des provinces, le budget lui-même contenait une autre trouvaille : la possibilité d’introduire les « hypothèques islamiques » dans le système bancaire canadien.

Il ne suffisait pas qu’Ottawa se prépare à appuyer la contestation de la Loi sur la laïcité de l’État devant la Cour suprême ; il lui fallait aussi agiter ce chiffon rouge devant le taureau. Après tout, si la religion peut avoir sa place dans les institutions publiques, pourquoi pas dans les banques, n’est-ce pas ?

Comme il fallait s’y attendre, le gouvernement Legault n’a pas tardé à réagir. « Nous sommes clairement mal à l’aise avec cette idée », a déclaré le ministre responsable de la Laïcité, Jean-François Roberge. « Traiter différemment, d’un point de vue bancaire, les personnes selon leurs croyances religieuses est en contradiction des choix qu’a faits le Québec. » La laïcité est un des rares sujets sur lesquels la Coalition avenir Québec peut encore espérer rallier une majorité de Québécois.

Sans surprise, le Parti québécois a aussi signifié son opposition, mais le Parti libéral et Québec solidaire (QS), tous deux opposés à la loi 21, sont manifestement embarrassés. « Nous allons prendre le temps d’étudier l’enjeu avant de nous prononcer », a déclaré le député libéral de Marguerite-Bourgeoys, Frédéric Beauchemin, tandis que QS préfère attendre de voir si le gouvernement Trudeau décidera d’aller de l’avant lors de la mise à jour économique de l’automne prochain. Et prier pour qu’il se ravise.

*****

Le chef du Bloc québécois, Yves-François Blanchet, a dénoncé ce qui constituerait à ses yeux « un dangereux précédent », qui serait créé pour des raisons purement « clientélistes » par un gouvernement cherchant à « racoler le vote de la minorité musulmane canadienne et québécoise ».

Les hypothèques islamiques ou « halal », qui remplacent le paiement d’intérêts par d’autres formes de frais, ne font pas l’unanimité au sein même de la communauté musulmane, qui en débat depuis des années. En 2009, le groupe saoudien AlBassam House avait demandé au gouvernement Harper l’autorisation d’ouvrir une première banque offrant ce service au Canada, ce que ne permet pas la loi.

Après avoir longuement examiné la question, la Société canadienne d’hypothèques et de logement (SCHL) avait écarté cette possibilité qui n’intéresse encore aucune des grandes banques. Ceux qui souhaitent contracter une hypothèque de type halal conforme à la charia peuvent s’adresser à des coopératives musulmanes.

Un des opposants les plus acharnés à ce sujet, que le Bloc québécois a pris à témoin, est Tarek Fatah, fondateur du Congrès musulman du Canada, à ne pas confondre avec le Conseil national des musulmans canadiens, vivement opposé à la loi 21.

Ce journaliste d’origine pakistanaise, qui a eu une carrière passablement mouvementée, a notamment milité pour le Nouveau Parti démocratique, dont il a claqué la porte parce qu’il le jugeait trop accueillant pour les islamistes.

Déjà, il y a quinze ans, il s’était réjoui du rejet des hypothèques islamistes par la SCHL. « Cela cible des musulmans vulnérables et marginalisés, à qui l’on dit que, s’ils font affaire à des non-musulmans, ils iront en enfer. C’est comme l’Église catholique du XIIIe siècle », disait-il.

*****

Au reste, comme dans le cas du port du voile, l’interdiction de l’intérêt résulterait d’une interprétation discutable du Coran par le mouvement islamiste. C’est plutôt « l’usure » que proscrirait le livre saint, c’est-à-dire un taux d’intérêt excessif.

Tous n’ont pas les mêmes réserves. Aux critiques de M. Fatah, le magazine Maclean’s avait opposé celles d’un professeur de l’Université de Toronto, Walid Hejazi, selon lequel le Canada avait tout intérêt à s’ouvrir à la « finance islamique ».

La demande va aller en augmentant et le Canada risque d’être écarté d’un marché mondial qui va atteindre des centaines de milliards, plaidait-il. Selon lui, l’hypothèque islamique est un produit financier comme les autres qui peut être utilisé aussi bien par un musulman ou un non-musulman.

Outre l’aspect économique, permettre à des gens d’avoir accès à un financement compatible avec leurs convictions religieuses « serait cohérent avec les valeurs fondamentales du Canada et notre fière histoire », ajoutait M. Hejazi. La question est de savoir si cela est cohérent avec celles du Québec.

La possibilité d’introduire des considérations religieuses dans le système financier n’avait pas été discutée lors du débat sur la laïcité, mais elle aurait probablement soulevé un tollé. Justin Trudeau ne cherche sans doute pas à provoquer volontairement le Québec. C’est simplement que ce dernier ne fait pas partie de sa vision du Canada. N’empêche qu’il joue avec le feu.

Source: Chronique | Le multiculturalisme financier

Clark provides a suitable riposte:

….Yet Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet and some of his MPs issued dark warnings that three paragraphs in last week’s budget will set Canada – and therefore Quebec – on a slippery slope into sharia law.

This is dumb. Or disingenuous. Probably both.

The budget passage in question indicated that the mandarins of Finance Canada will explore possible ways to expand access to halal mortgages and other “alternative financing products.”…

Source: The Bloc’s fake freakout over halal mortgages is ridiculous

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Chinese Communist Party-affiliated institute compiled profiles of Canadian MPs of Chinese descent

2024/04/23 Leave a comment

Not unexpected but different than normal engagement of diaspora communties that Canada also practices with respect to its expatriates:

A research institute in China that is affiliated with the ruling Communist Party’s foreign-influence operations compiled extensive profiles of members of Parliament with Chinese ethnicity, two sources say.

The sources say this Chinese institute used large-scale data analytics and artificial intelligence to create detailed profiles in 2022. There are fewer than 10 MPs of Chinese descent in Canada’s House of Commons.

The profiles were drawn up by a research institute that supports the work of China’s United Front Work Department, a body that answers to the party’s central committee. UFWD oversees Beijing’s influence, propaganda and intelligence operations inside and outside China. The Globe and Mail has been unable to confirm the name of the institute.

The sources say China’s cyber and digital operation to gather information on these MPs was first detected by the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Canada’s secret signals intelligence agency, and shared with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). The Globe is not revealing the identity of the two sources, who risk prosecution under the Security of Information Act for discussing these matters….

Source: Chinese Communist Party-affiliated institute compiled profiles of Canadian MPs of Chinese descent

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Golden Visa Programs, Once a Boon, Lose Their Luster

2024/04/23 Leave a comment

Long overdue:

Faced with growing pressure to address its housing crunch, Spain said this month that it would scrap its golden visas, the latest in a wider withdrawal from the program by governments around Europe.

Half a dozen eurozone countries offered the visas at the height of Europe’s debt crisis in 2012 to help plug gaping budget deficits. Countries that needed international bailouts — Spain, Ireland, Portugal and Greece among them — were especially desperate for cash to repay creditors, and saw a path to bring in investors while reviving their moribund real estate markets.

The golden visa program brought Spain billions of euros in investments. But property prices paid by rich foreigners are well beyond the earning power of locals.

Countries reaped a windfall: Spain alone has issued 14,576 visas linked to wealthy buyers making real estate investments of more than €500,000. But the prices that they can afford are squeezing people like Dr. Barba out of a market that had already been highly inflated by the rise of Airbnb and the draw of Wall Street investors.

“Access to housing needs to be a right instead of a speculative business,” Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, said in a speech this month as he announced the end of the country’s golden visa program. “Major cities are facing highly stressed markets, and it’s almost impossible to find decent housing for those who already live, work and pay their taxes.”

The visas make it easy for people outside the European Union to buy the right to temporary residency, sometimes without having to live in the country. Investors from China, Russia and the Middle East flocked to buy real estate through them.

In recent years, British nationals have followed suit in the wake of Brexit, snapping up homes in Greece, Portugal and Spain, joined by an increasing number of Americans looking to enjoy a lifestyle they can’t afford in major U.S. cities.

But golden visa programs are now being phased out or shut down around Europe as governments seek to undo the damage to the housing market. And after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, E.U. officials urged governments to end them, warning they could be used for money laundering, tax evasion and even organized crime….

Source: Golden Visa Programs, Once a Boon, Lose Their Luster

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Erfan: Middle East student dialogue: As an expert in deep conflict, what I’ve learned about making conversation possible

2024/04/23 Leave a comment

Timely (the Wosk Centre for Dialogue specializes in difficult conversations):

…Secret ingredient: ‘Containers’

One secret ingredient to successfully working with groups concerned with contentious topics is creating physical and psychological conditions that make it easier to speak and listen with the goal of understanding. These are known as dialogic containers. Facilitators and participants intentionally build these, and they can include things like: how the room is set up; the level of hospitality in the space; explicit agreements participants in the group assent to about how to be together.

On the night of the BDS dialogue, I thought a lot about the container, including preparing myself intellectually and emotionally to facilitate. But in the group, we also spent nearly an hour building the container through negotiating group agreements. 

Negotiating group agreements

There are many examples of standard group agreements, but I believe in making them from scratch every time, for each unique situation and group. Often groups make agreements about confidentiality and avoiding personal attacks. 

The night of the 2015 BDS referendum, students negotiated some unique agreements, including: 

  • That we would acknowledge the right to existence for both Palestinian and Israeli people and the right to existence of the States of Palestine and Israel, according to the 1967 borders. (This item, which is in the heart of much of the contention in the region, took the majority of the hour to negotiate. It wasn’t that everyone — or anyone — in the room was happy with it — but it was enough recognition, enough of a bridge, to make the conversation possible).
  • That if the conversation stretched past 8 p.m., we would order pizza and the options must include vegetarian, gluten-free, vegan, Halal and Kosher. (I have always felt that the pizza agreement was a breakthrough because by the time you are talking about sharing food, much humanizing has happened.)

‘Flagging’ in real time

In other spaces, my students have negotiated:

  • an intention to avoid using supercharged labels thrown around on the internet (words like “race-baiter,” “snowflake” or “fascist”);
  • to replace an impulse to shout with a declaration of “I am not feeling heard”;
  • to have an observer raise a literal flag when a person was on the edge of stereotyping. 

Not all situations are ripe for dialogue. Charged civil conversations on a university campus do not solve the big conflicts of our times, nor does a whole semester in dialogue. 

Some critics even say that these initiatives divert attention, and take away the energy from pursuing justice, or that they “normalize” oppressive arrangements by sugarcoating them in dialogue. 

Capacity to be together

But these initiatives do provide a space for students who have never been in conversation with each other to talk, to ask questions that they cannot ask anywhere else and to gain more nuanced perspectives.

The capacity to be together is important to pick up while we are students, lest we think that online screaming matches or acts of despair and total disengagement are our only options.

As difficult as it is to remain in conversation on something as divisive as the Hamas-Israel war, as an educator I hope we remain on the lookout for the right time to get back into talking with each other about this on our university campuses.

Source: Middle East student dialogue: As an expert in deep conflict, what I’ve learned about making conversation possible

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Bruni: The Most Important Thing I Teach My Students Isn’t on the Syllabus

2024/04/22 Leave a comment

Thoughtful approach, recognizing the complexity of issues and viewpoints and the need for humility:

I warn my students. At the start of every semester, on the first day of every course, I confess to certain passions and quirks and tell them to be ready: I’m a stickler for correct grammar, spelling and the like, so if they don’t have it in them to care about and patrol for such errors, they probably won’t end up with the grade they’re after. I want to hear everyone’s voice — I tell them that, too — but I don’t want to hear anybody’s voice so often and so loudly that the other voices don’t have a chance.

And I’m going to repeat one phrase more often than any other: “It’s complicated.” They’ll become familiar with that. They may even become bored with it. I’ll sometimes say it when we’re discussing the roots and branches of a social ill, the motivations of public (and private) actors and a whole lot else, and that’s because I’m standing before them not as an ambassador of certainty or a font of unassailable verities but as an emissary of doubt. I want to give them intelligent questions, not final answers. I want to teach them how much they have to learn — and how much they will always have to learn.

I’d been on the faculty of Duke University and delivering that spiel for more than two years before I realized that each component of it was about the same quality: humility. The grammar-and-spelling bit was about surrendering to an established and easily understood way of doing things that eschewed wild individualism in favor of a common mode of communication. It showed respect for tradition, which is a force that binds us, a folding of the self into a greater whole. The voices bit — well, that’s obvious. It’s a reminder that we share the stages of our communities, our countries, our worlds, with many other actors and should  conduct ourselves in a manner that recognizes this fact. And “it’s complicated” is a bulwark against arrogance, absolutism, purity, zeal.

I’d also been delivering that spiel for more than two years before I realized that humility is the antidote to grievance.

We live in an era defined and overwhelmed by grievance — by too many Americans’ obsession with how they’ve been wronged and their insistence on wallowing in ire. This anger reflects a pessimism that previous generations didn’t feel. The ascent of identity politics and the influence of social media, it turned out, were better at inflaming us than uniting us. They promote a self-obsession at odds with community, civility, comity and compromise. It’s a problem of humility.

The Jan. 6 insurrectionists were delusional, frenzied, savage. But above all, they were unhumble. They decided that they held the truth, no matter all the evidence to the contrary. They couldn’t accept that their preference for one presidential candidate over another could possibly put them in the minority — or perhaps a few of them just reasoned that if it did, then everybody else was too misguided to matter. They elevated how they viewed the world and what they wanted over tradition, institutional stability, law, order.

It’s no accident that they were acting in the service of Donald Trump, whose pitch to Americans from the very start was a strikingly — even shockingly — unhumble one. “I alone can fix it,” he proclaimed in his 2016 speech accepting the Republican Party’s nomination for president; and at his inauguration in January of the following year, the word “humbled,” which had been present in the first inaugural remarks of both Barack Obama and George W. Bush, was nowhere to be found. Nor were any of its variants. That whole sentiment and politesse were missing, as they had been during a campaign centered on his supposed omniscience.

There are now mini-Trumps aplenty in American politics, but anti-Trumps will be our salvation, and I say that not along partisan or ideological lines. I’m talking about character and how a society holds itself together. It does that with concern for the common good, with respect for the institutions and procedures that protect that and with political leaders who ideally embody those traits or at least promote them.

Those leaders exist. When Charlie Baker, a former Massachusetts governor, was enjoying enormous favor and lofty approval ratings as a Republican in a predominantly Democratic state, he was also stressing the importance of humility. He was fond of quoting Philippians 2:3, which he invoked as a lodestar for his administration. “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit,” it says. “Rather, in humility value others above yourself.”

That’s great practical advice for anyone in government, where most meaningful success hinges on teamwork and significant progress requires consensus. Governing, as opposed to demagoguery, is about earning others’ trust and cooperation. Exhibiting a willingness to listen to and to hear them goes a long way toward that.

“Insight and knowledge come from curiosity and humility,” Mr. Baker wrote in a 2022 book, “Results,” coauthored with his chief of staff, Steve Kadish, a Democrat. “Snap judgments — about people or ideas — are fueled by arrogance and conceit. They create blind spots and missed opportunities. Good ideas and interesting ways to accomplish goals in public life exist all over the place if you have the will, the curiosity, and the humility to find them.”

Humble politicians don’t insist on one-size-fits-all answers when those aren’t necessary as a matter of basic rights and fundamental justice. Humble activists don’t either. The campaign for same-sex marriage — one of the most successful social movements of recent decades — showed that progress can be made not by shaming people, not by telling them how awful they are, but by suggesting how much better they could be. Marriage-equality advocates emphasized a brighter future that they wanted to create, not an ugly past that they wanted to litigate. They also wisely assured Americans that gay and lesbian people weren’t trying to explode a cherished institution and upend a system of values, but instead wanted in.

“I don’t want to disparage shouting and demands — everything has its place,” Evan Wolfson, the founder of the pivotal advocacy group Freedom to Marry, told me when we revisited the movement’s philosophy and tactics. At times, he acknowledged, champions of a cause “need to break the silence, we need to push, we need to force.”

“But I used to say, ‘Yes, there’s demanding, but there’s also asking,’” he recalled. “And one is not the enemy of the other. People don’t like being accused, people don’t like being condemned, people don’t like being alienated. It’s a matter of conversation and persuasion.”

That’s consistent with the message delivered by Loretta Ross, a longtime racial justice and human rights advocate, through her teaching, public speaking and writing. Troubled by the frequent targeting and pillorying of people on social media, she urged the practice of calling in rather than calling out those who’ve upset you. “Call-outs make people fearful of being targeted,” she wrote in a guest essay for Times Opinion. “People avoid meaningful conversations when hypervigilant perfectionists point out apparent mistakes, feeding the cannibalistic maw of the cancel culture.” Instead, she advised, engage them. If you believe they need enlightenment, try that route, “without the self-indulgence of drama,” she wrote.

She was preaching humility.

She was also recognizing other people’s right to disagree — to live differently, to talk differently. Pluralism is as much about that as it is about a multiracial, multifaith, multigender splendor. That doesn’t mean a surrender or even a compromise of principles; a person can hold on to those while practicing tolerance, which has been supplanted by grievance. Tolerance shares DNA with respect. It recognizes that other people have rights and inherent value even when we disagree vehemently with them.

We all carry wounds, and some of us carry wounds much graver than others. We confront obstacles, including unjust and senseless ones. We must tend to those wounds. We must push hard at those obstacles. But we mustn’t treat every wound, every obstacle, as some cosmic outrage or mortal danger. We mustn’t lose sight of the struggle, imperfection and randomness of life. We mustn’t overstate our vulnerability and exaggerate our due.

While grievance blows our concerns out of proportion, humility puts them in perspective. While grievance reduces the people with whom we disagree to caricature, humility acknowledges that they’re every bit as complex as we are — with as much of a stake in creating a more perfect union.

Source: The Most Important Thing I Teach My Students Isn’t on the Syllabus

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OPINION: University of Ottawa equity, diversity, inclusivity discussion ‘an abject failure’

2024/04/22 Leave a comment

Does appear to be an unbalanced selection of panelists:

Let’s say you are the vice president of Equity, Diversity and Inclusive (Excellence?), VP EDI, at a Canadian university and you organize an event to have a “courageous conversation” about anti-Palestinian racism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism that ends up being a uniform rant against Israel and Zionism with no equity, no diversity, or inclusion for Jews.

This is exactly what happened on March 27 during the two-hour Zoom panel convened by the Vice-Provost of Equity, Diversity and Inclusive Excellence at the University of Ottawa, professor Awad Ibrahim.

With the declared goal of addressing in a balanced and unbiased manner the problem of increasing discrimination against Muslims, Palestinians, and Jews in Canada, especially in light of the conflict between Israel and Hamas after the massacre perpetrated by Palestinian Islamists on Oct. 7, the convened panel theoretically sought a balance: two people would discuss issues linked to anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia, and two would talk about anti-Semitism.

In reality, the four speakers spoke with a unified biased voice minimizing the precipitous rise in anti-Semitism in Canada and around the world, because, according to them, many of the events that are reported as anti-Jewish are simply “legitimate” (sic) expressions against Zionism, Israeli colonialism, and the defense of the struggle of the Palestinians against the “Zionist occupation” and do not really target the Jewish community.

The activist Dalia El Farra (senior advisor, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion – Centre for Human Rights, York University) and professor Jasmin Zine (Wilfrid Laurier University) represented the pro-Palestinian and anti-Islamophobia views. Two members of the Jewish Faculty Network (an anti-Israel organization), professor Sheryl Nestel and professor Alejandro Paz (University of Toronto), both anti-Zionists Jews, were invited to talk about anti-Semitism.

The main function of both Jewish panelists was to assert that the increase in antisemitic incidents is inflated by the “Jewish lobby,” because they dare to count as anti-Jewish events those that are actually demonstrations against the “Western colonial enterprise” (sic) known as Zionism and against Israeli “genocide” (sic).

Although Vice-Provost Ibrahim was asked during the event’s Q&A why he had decided to invite only two anti-Zionist Jewish speakers to talk about anti-Semitism, the VP EDI made only brief mention of the question towards his closing remarks and did not answer the question…

…In French, one might have described the event by exclaiming, “Quel gâchis!” (What a flop!) to qualify this EDI event (by the way, if we are talking about inclusion, it should be noted that only English-speaking panelists were invited, thus failing the bilingual mandate of the University of Ottawa). It was certainly not a courageous conversation, nor was it diverse, not equitable, and lacked the inclusiveness of multiple viewpoints. It offered only a single, ahistorical, hateful chorus of anti-Israel propaganda.

Perhaps professor Ibrahim, the vice president of Equity, Diversity and Inclusive Excellence, thought he was promoting balanced perspectives because he had hosted an event as part of the same series on March 21 about Anti-Semitism in Healthcare, University and our Larger Society. Instead, the panel on Demystifying Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian racism and anti-Semitism of March 27 was a missed opportunity for the University of Ottawa’s EDI office to fulfill its mandate, failing to meet the most basic standards of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

The false moral equivalence between these two events, the former being grounded in scholarly research and fact, the latter being grounded in one-sided bias attempting to delegitimize Judaism and Israel, undermines inclusive excellence in the academy and further contributes to Jew hatred on Canadian campuses.

This is an abject failure of leadership of the VP EDI at the University of Ottawa and a direct assault on the protection of all minorities on Canadian campuses. It is a betrayal of trust with the Jewish community, and it undermines the core mission of the University to reveal and disseminate truth.

— Isaac Nahon-Serfaty is an Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa and Deron Brown is an MD in Toronto

Source: OPINION: University of Ottawa equity, diversity, inclusivity discussion ‘an abject failure’

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