Regg Cohn: Who says we need to choose between Palestinians and Israelis?

2023/12/14 1 Comment

Good and needed commentary. Binary over simplifies. Hopefully Gondek can treat this as a learning moment:

…

Put simply, to be anti-Zionist today is to be anti-Israel. To be anti-Israel is to show antipathy to all those Jews who believe Israel is a sanctuary and ought not to be a cemetery for Jews.

As to the larger question of whether or not an anti-Zionist is antisemitic, rest assured it is problematic for most Jews. Slogans matter, just as words matter, countries matter, people matter.

Appearances matter, and so do no-shows. It is telling that Her Worship the mayor of Calgary worships at the altar of indifference to Israel, but another current slogan comes to mind:

Happy Hanukkah

Source: Who says we need to choose between Palestinians and Israelis?

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

How Unconscious Bias in Health Care Puts Pregnant Black Women at Higher Risk

2023/12/14 Leave a comment

Of note (and disturbing):

Shakima Tozay was 37 years old and six months pregnant when a nurse, checking the fetal heart rate of the baby boy she was carrying, referred to him as “a hoodlum.”

Ms. Tozay, a social worker, froze. She had just been hospitalized at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Wash., with pre-eclampsia, a life-threatening complication of pregnancy, and she is Black.

“A ‘hoodlum’?” she said. “Why would you call him that?”

The fetus was 14 inches long and weighed little more than a box of chocolates.

A doctor who came into the room downplayed the comment, saying the nurse was just kidding, but that only hurt Ms. Tozay more. She was already distressed: She and her husband lost an earlier twin pregnancy, and now she worried this baby was at risk, too. The hospital later apologized for the nurse’s behavior, but the damage was done.

Black women , who die of pregnancy-related complications at two to three times the rate of white women, say that remarks like these, often made when they are most vulnerable, reflect pervasive bias in the medical system. They report that medical staff don’t listen to them when they complain of symptoms, and dismiss or downplay their concerns. Studies validate their experiences: Analyses of taped conversations between physicians and patients have found that doctors dominate the conversation more with Black patients and don’t ask as many questions as they do of white patients. In medical notes, doctors are more likely to express skepticism about the symptoms Black patients report.

Hovering over these experiences is the stark reality that Black women have worse pregnancy outcomes, lose more infants in the first year of life and have higher rates of preterm birth and stillbirth, when compared with white women. Glaring racial disparities in health outcomes persist between white women and even the wealthiest Black women, and between Black women and white women who experience the same complications.

These findings have forced the medical establishment to acknowledge and confront its biases. Many health systems have mandated anti-bias training for faculty. Some hospital committees that review cases with poor outcomes in order to identify the causes now consider whether racial bias played a role.

Experts who study bias in medical care say that a vast majority of people in the healing professions have good intentions, but that even providers who reject overt racism have internalized cultural stereotypes, and that this unconscious or implicit bias can influence medical care and bedside manner.

“They will say, ‘Hey, I’m not biased,’ and consciously they are not,” said Dr. Cristina M. Gonzalez, a professor of medicine and an associate director at the Institute for Excellence in Health Equity at NYU Langone Health. “But the unconscious runs a lot of the show during the day.”

The brain is wired to make decisions quickly, said Sarah M. Wilson, an assistant professor at Duke University. It uses cognitive shortcuts that let bias seep in, especially when a person is uncertain, tired or stressed — common circumstances in a busy practice or hospital, where providers often treat patients they do not know.

“If it’s a very complicated situation and you have to make a decision at a moment’s notice,” Dr. Wilson said, “then it is very natural to fall back on these automatic assumptions.”

“They sent us away”

Ms. Tozay was sent home from the hospital that evening in 2017 on bed rest. Pre-eclampsia, a serious condition that causes extremely high blood pressure, can lead to preterm birth, stillbirth, organ damage and ultimately eclampsia — a sudden seizure that can be deadly for mother and baby.

Ms. Tozay and her husband, Glen Guss, kept a close eye on her blood pressure, measuring it often with a cuff. A few days later, it started climbing precipitously. During pregnancy, hypertension starts when the top number, which is systolic blood pressure, reaches 140 or more, or the bottom number, diastolic blood pressure, reaches 90 or more. One of Ms. Tozay’s systolic pressure readings was in the 190s, Mr. Guss said. Deeply worried, he drove her back to the hospital.

The intake nurse looked concerned and told the couple she would measure Ms. Tozay’s blood pressure again once she had calmed down. Some tests were done, and while Ms. Tozay waited to be seen by a doctor, her pressure declined to 149/81, according to her medical records, still too high.

Then, Ms. Tozay and her husband said, the nurse told them that the attending physician had said Ms. Tozay could go home.

Mr. Guss said in retrospect that the hospital did not give enough weight to factors that put his wife at high risk: her relatively advanced age for childbirth, previous miscarriage, uterine fibroids, low amniotic fluid, contractions early in the pregnancy and the pre-eclampsia diagnosis. He and Ms. Tozay said they never got the chance to tell a doctor that she felt something was very wrong, had been lightheaded and had “a surreal kind of feeling.”

A spokeswoman for the hospital, Melissa Tizon, said only a doctor could have ordered the tests Ms. Tozay was given, but she could not confirm from hospital records whether a physician actually examined her. She said that a physician had been “engaged” in Ms. Tozay’s care, but added, “We can’t tell if the physician was face to face with the patient.” Ms. Tizon said a hospital review of the interaction concluded that it “met the appropriate standards of care.” (Ms. Tozay gave written consent for hospital officials to discuss her care.)

Not having a physician examine a woman who came into the triage room at Ms. Tozay’s stage of pregnancy would be very unusual, said Dr. Tanya K. Sorensen, an obstetrician specializing in high-risk pregnancies who oversees women’s health care for a region of the Providence health system that includes the hospital where Ms. Tozay was treated.

“I wish that I had said, ‘No, I’m not going home,’” Ms. Tozay said recently. “But I didn’t know what was going on. My husband didn’t know. We were trusting that they knew.”

“There were so many red flags saying they should just take him out right away,” Mr. Guss said. “But they sent us away.”

The next morning, the fetus was not moving.

Stereotypes and skepticism

To better understand how bias plays out, I interviewed dozens of Black women who described disturbing experiences with health care providers during their pregnancies. Their accounts were corroborated whenever possible by medical records, emails with providers and other documentation, as well as interviews with family members and hospital officials.

In Ms. Tozay’s case, the hospital spokeswoman, Ms. Tizon, confirmed that Ms. Tozay filed a complaint with the hospital on Nov. 6 about the nurse’s hoodlum remark on Nov. 3. The manager of the hospital’s childbirth center, Lisa Von Herbulis, met with the nurse to discuss her lack of sensitivity and wrote a letter of apology to Ms. Tozay, dated Nov. 16, a copy of which Ms. Tozay shared with The New York Times.

In interviews, many Black women complained of being stereotyped by administrative staff, nurses and doctors and of being repeatedly asked about their marital status and insurance — even when they wore a wedding band, had a hyphenated last name or had private insurance.

“I was always being asked, ‘Where’s your baby daddy?’” said Ruhamah Dunmeyer Grooms, 35, a business analyst and mother who lives outside Charleston, S.C. “I don’t have a baby daddy. I have a husband.”

Black women are more likely to be tested for illicit drugs during labor and delivery than white women, regardless of their history of substance use, and even though they were less likely than white women to test positive, a recent study found.

Other studies indicate that physicians may express less empathyfor Black patients, compared with white patients, and their notes reflect a belief that Black patients are less likely to follow medical advice.

They are more likely to describe Black patients as uncooperative or “noncompliant,” and they may prescribe less aggressive treatment because they don’t think Black patients will adhere to it, experts say.

In one study of patient records, researchers found that doctors signal disbelief in the records of Black patients, appearing to question the credibility of their complaints by placing quotation marks around certain words — for example, writing that the patient “had a ‘reaction’ to the medication” — or by describing a complaint with words like “claims” or “insists.”

Failure to take patients seriously and believe their accounts can have deadly consequences.

Shalon Irving, a 36-year-old public health expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sought help from doctors at Emory Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Atlanta at least six times in the weeks after her cesarean section, according to her mother, Wanda Irving, who was helping her with the new baby and who accompanied her on three of the visits.

Shalon Irving felt ill, had severe headaches and gained almost 10 pounds, her mother said, but was sent home every time.

“Her blood pressure was so high the last time she went in that the nurse checked it twice,” Wanda Irving said. “She demanded to see the doctor and sat there waiting, but was told he was too busy.”

Within hours of returning home from that last visit, Dr. Irving collapsed and died, her mother said. An independent autopsy determined the cause of death was complications from hypertension. “We need to make doctors accountable for these deaths,” she said. “If it was a crime, they would pay more attention to what the patient is saying.”

A conservator for Dr. Irving’s baby girl, Soleil, reached a financial settlement with Emory Healthcare. The hospital, citing federal medical privacy laws, declined to comment.

Doctors who don’t listen

Black patients say that health providers often disregard and overrule their wishes.

Pregnant Black women are more likely than white women to say they were pressured to undergo cesarean section deliveries and other childbirth interventions, such as epidurals and labor induction, when they sought to avoid them. Although a C-section may be unavoidable when a woman develops complications or the fetus is at risk, it is major surgery and can be more dangerous than a vaginal delivery.

When Tennille Leak-Johnson’s fetus stopped growing at a normal rate, her doctor in Chicago counseled her and her husband about the option of terminating the pregnancy, even before genetic testing was carried out, Dr. Leak-Johnson said. Her doctor also offered the option of placing the infant with a family that wanted to adopt a sick or disabled child.

The doctor, who is no longer practicing in Chicago, did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but Dr. Leak-Johnson’s medical records contain a note her doctor wrote expressing concern about the baby’s health early on in the pregnancy and a lengthy summary of the doctor’s counseling on abortion or adoption.

Fetal growth restriction can signal a serious medical condition in the fetus, but Dr. Leak-Johnson and her husband were unequivocal about wanting to keep the pregnancy.

“I told the doctor that even if I could only love him for one day or one hour, I was not getting rid of him,” said Dr. Leak-Johnson, who has a doctorate in molecular genetics and genomics and was familiar with the medical risks.

Dr. Leak-Johnson said she was a high-risk patient because of her weight, so she saw her doctor frequently. At each appointment, she said, the doctor raised the question of termination — continuing to do so even after genetic testing and a 20-week anatomy scan found neither genetic nor structural abnormalities.

A brief note the doctor put in Dr. Leak-Johnson’s chart after the normal test results reiterated the doctor’s concern that something was wrong with the baby. The only reference the note made to the normal genetic test results, which revealed the sex, was that the fetus was male.

Mid-pregnancy, Dr. Leak-Johnson switched doctors.

Her son, Stanley Johnson III, was born 11 weeks before his due date, and Dr. Leak-Johnson became acutely ill during the delivery. But the baby — who spent two months in neonatal intensive care — survived and has thrived.

He turned 12 this year, and “aside from his wearing glasses because of his prematurity, you wouldn’t even know that he was born a pound and 14 ounces,” Dr. Leak-Johnson said. “He’s the love of my life.”

Prioritizing the mother’s care

A lack of empathy in medical settings can put pregnant women at risk.

In New York State, Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn pushed for a measure, which became law in 2020, that requires hospitals to care for women in preterm labor, after she herself was turned away from Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

Ms. Hermelyn, who was 43 at the time, said her Columbia-affiliated doctor sent her to the hospital in 2016 when her labor started at 22 weeks. She was distraught over the possible loss of the pregnancy, she said, but hospital doctors told her that they were not required to intervene to save the pregnancy at such an early stage in gestation. They told her she was almost three centimeters dilated and that they could not do anything to stop the labor or save the fetus at that stage, she said.

“They said, ‘We can terminate your baby,’ but that was not an option, and made me cry even more,” Ms. Hermelyn said. The doctors told her they had other patients to tend to and “sent me home,” she added.

Columbia University officials refused to comment on the case.

In interviews, experts not involved in the case noted that when preterm labor starts before 24 weeks of gestation, the baby is extremely unlikely to survive, so hospitals do not generally take extraordinary measures to save the fetus. Labor in these cases can be protracted, so a woman who is admitted might be hospitalized for several days.

Ms. Hermelyn turned to Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Brooklyn, a hospital that predominantly serves patients who are low-income, on Medicaid or uninsured, and where the staff knew her. They admitted her, sought to relieve her emotional distress and tried, but failed, to save the baby.

The mother herself needed care, said Dr. Daniel Faustin, director of Wyckoff’s division of maternal and fetal medicine. Ms. Hermelyn had a high-risk pregnancy, and preterm labor put her at risk of serious infection. If she delivered at home, she would risk deadly hemorrhaging.

“Even if you give up on the baby, you cannot give up on the mother,” he said. “The best place for her to be if she’s going to deliver is in the hospital, to make sure that after this unfortunate experience, her life is not at risk.”

When Ms. Hermelyn gave birth to a son last year, she named him Daniel, after Dr. Faustin.

From tragedy, reforms

After Ms. Tozay and Mr. Guss’s baby stopped moving, they returned to the hospital. Doctors could not find the heartbeat, confirming the couple’s fears. The placenta had separated from the wall of the uterus, cutting off the flow of oxygen to the baby, a complication that occurs more frequently when the mother has high blood pressure. The baby they planned to name Jaxson was dead.

A hospital doctor who had not cared for her before performed a cesarean section. As she handed the dead newborn to Mr. Guss, the doctor said, “Congratulations — I mean, I’m so sorry for your loss.”

Ms. Tozay and Mr. Guss said they were still reeling from the stillbirth when the doctor told them that she should never have become pregnant, and that they should not try to conceive again.

“I felt blamed, like she was saying: ‘Why would you ever think about having a kid? You just killed your son,’” Ms. Tozay said.

Mr. Guss said, “Even if it was true, it didn’t need to be said right then and there.”

Dr. Sorensen, the executive medical director of Providence, and Dr. Nwando Anyaoku, chief health equity officer, said they did not doubt Ms. Tozay’s recollections. “For her, that moment is probably etched in her mind,” Dr. Anyaoku said.

The doctor who did the C-section might have been exhausted, distracted or distressed, but that did not excuse the lack of sensitivity, Dr. Sorensen said. “The whole case is incredibly heartbreaking,” she said. “That’s not the experience we want to deliver.”

In 2020, Providence invested $50 million to reduce health inequities and racial disparities in maternal outcomes. It has educated its staff about implicit bias and started new programs for pregnant women: JUST Birth Network, which matches pregnant women of color with doulas who help them navigate the health care system, and TeamBirth, a framework for open communication between patients and providers.

The health system is seeking to reduce C-section rates for Black women and to improve care after birth, when many complications occur. Clinical review committees that examine hospital cases have been instructed to consider whether implicit bias played a role in poor outcomes.

A Washington State initiative aimed at improving outcomes for women with pre-eclampsia encourages health providers to give pregnant women with high blood pressure blue wristbands to draw attention to the condition — and to ensure no doctor or nurse overlooks it.

Ms. Tozay and Mr. Guss have decided not to try another pregnancy, though her regular obstetrician said it would be safe to do so.

“The words of the delivering doctor will always stick with me,” Ms. Tozay said. “Doctors need to realize that what they say carries power and weight.”

Source: How Unconscious Bias in Health Care Puts Pregnant Black Women at Higher Risk

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Friedman: Here’s What the University Presidents Should’ve Said to Congress

2023/12/13 Leave a comment

Good commentary:

I suspect I am not the only one who found it difficult to laugh on Saturday night, watching SNL’s send-up of last week’s congressional hearing on antisemitism and college campuses. Coming only hours after Liz Magill actually resigned as Penn’s president amid the ongoing fallout, the real-world consequences of the hearing had become too… well, real.

Here was a leading university president stepping down, amid a storm of politicians’ and donors’ demands, after an exchange with Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) from last week’s hearing went viral. In it, Magill, along with the presidents of Harvard (Claudine Gay) and MIT (Sally Kornbluth), offered a series of technical, “lawyerly” responses to the question of whether calling for genocide of Jews on campus would constitute bullying or harassment under their codes of conduct.

Stefanik’s audacious and frank question demanded a fuller explanation; but the presidents’ curt responses left many aghast at the prospect that such a heinous hypothetical could ever be construed as acceptable.

The fallout was swift. Now, the incident has a high likelihood of shaping the next wave of a years-long debate about free speech on college campuses.

At best, it may spur universities to review their philosophies and policies, and to recommit to creating campuses where bigotry and hate are rejected and where open and respectful exchange can thrive. At worst, it may embolden some politicians to ratchet up their attacks on higher ed, using the latest crisis to advance ideological ends.

“One down,” Stefanik posted on X in response to the news of Magill’s resignation, “Two to go.”

“…these leaders might have modeled how fostering a climate of free speech and open exchange need not—and must not—mean allowing hate to flourish unchecked.”

Meanwhile, the people who have spent years pushing for bans on Critical Race Theory, gender studies, or seeking to dictate how faculty teach about American history, have already announced their intention to introduce bills to fight antisemitism for the upcoming legislative sessions. We ought to be skeptical when the team that has repeatedly shown its desire to advance censorship now seeks to be in the vanguard of setting out new regulations for speech.

But perhaps most troubling about the now viral exchange is that Magill, Gay, and Kornbluth were technically correct. Any free speech advocate will tell you that the analysis of whether insulting, offensive, odious, or even hateful speech can be punishable begins with the question of context.

This is understandably compounded on university campuses by their size and complexity. For the application of university policies it obviously matters who is speaking—students, faculty, administrators, invited speakers—and where—in a classroom, in the quad, in a dorm room, on social media, etc.

Certainly, Magill, Gay, and Kornbluth could have made this all clearer. As private universities, they are not obligated to hew to the First Amendment, but many do, understanding that this offers the best safeguards for free speech and academic freedom. The presidents could have explained this in greater detail, and how this works in practice. They could have explained how different kinds of speech might be punishable in certain circumstances but not in others. And they could have offered a clear condemnation of the hypothetical before them, regardless of the legal or policy analysis involved.

The high-stakes format of the congressional hearing was, of course, not set up for the nuanced exchange this question truly demands. And perhaps that was the point. As Michelle Goldberg explained in the The New York Times, the clip looks really different when viewed on its own than it does in the context of the entire hearing, where it seems clear that Stefanik was referring to her own earlier questions about whether certain specific common pro-Palestinian slogans like “from the river to the sea” directly connote genocide of Jews or not.

The context—again—matters. If Magill, Gay, and Kornbluth thought they were being asked about whether certain specific phrases should result in punishments, their hesitancy to say that they should, from a speech-protective lens, is not only technically consistent with the First Amendment, it also makes a lot more sense.

In the wake of the hearing, in addition to Magill’s resignation, we are now seeing ideas to regulate “hate speech” put forth, such as one resolution from the Board of Advisors at Wharton, that, among other things, proposes to punish students and faculty for celebrating murder or using language “that threatens the physical safety of community members.” The language of the resolution is general and vague, and particularly in campus contexts where students now routinely invoke notions of “harm” and “microaggressions,” it would inevitably open the door to chilling a wide swath of speech on any side of the Israel-Palestine conflict—let alone on a great many other issues, too.

But this is the danger in this moment: that institutions adopt new policies to restrict speech in the rush to remedy their image, policies which might appear to solve one challenge, but will in fact make many other challenges worse. Proposals to ban “hate speech” against racial and ethnic minorities, for example, tend not to contemplate how they can be used by someone like former President Donald Trump, who said “Black Lives Matter” was a “symbol of hate,” or by really any authority to suppress any speech they find disfavorable.

The better answer that Magill, Gay, and Kornbluth could have proffered last week would have been to explain that just because an incident of hateful speech might not constitute grounds for punishment, it does not mean that it needs to be construed as acceptable to a college or university community. And that the question of determining a punishment for speech can, in fact, be separate from a university’s more immediate holistic response: to condemn hate, work to educate their communities, and offer resources to those impacted.

In so doing these leaders might have modeled how fostering a climate of free speech and open exchange need not—and must not—mean allowing hate to flourish unchecked.

The missed opportunity to offer moral clarity and condemnation of hate at last week’s hearing has invited criticism from those who care deeply about higher ed’s future, as well as those who have been working to impose new ideological controls on universities, or generally undermine them. We must be wary of what comes next—as some who want to take advantage of this crisis are clearly already making plans.

Jonathan Friedman is Director of Free Expression and Education at PEN America.

Source: Here’s What the University Presidents Should’ve Said to Congress

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Ottawa backs listing Black and LGBTQ workers under Canada’s workplace equity laws: source

2023/12/13 Leave a comment

Of note pending the official announcement. IMO, the addition of LGBTQ addresses the major gap in the Act as Black people are covered under visible minorities and desegregated data provides the needed granularity.

Will see the degree to which this is a priority for the government once legislation is tabled:

The federal government says it supports listing Black and LGBTQ people among groups facing systemic workplace barriers under the Employment Equity Act, CBC News has learned.

The Liberal government is backing the legislative change after a task force report recommended the move.

A source told CBC News earlier on Monday that Ottawa “broadly supports” that recommendation and others from a task force that reviewed the legislation. The government made an initial commitment Monday to modernize the act, the source said.

Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan and the task force chair, McGill University law professor Adelle Blackett, will present the committee’s findings outside the House of Commons foyer on Monday.

The stated purpose of the 1986 Employment Equity Act is to knock down employment barriers marginalized communities face. It identifies four groups that face additional barriers in the workplace: women, Indigenous peoples, people with disabilities and members of visible minorities.

Decades after the law’s passage, it is “startling to see how unrepresentative some employment remains across Canada,” the report states.

The task force recommends that Black workers comprise a separate group under the Employment Equity Act, instead of falling under the label of “visible minority.” Statistics Canada says 1.5 million people in Canada reported being Black in 2021. The Black population accounts for 16 per cent of the racialized population and 4.3 per cent of the overall population.

“Many Canadians may only recently have learned that slavery existed in Canada,” reads a section of the task force’s report, obtained by CBC News before its release. “The case for a distinct Employment Equity Act category specifically for people of African descent is rooted in part in the legacies of slavery.

“The history of segregation — in service provision, housing, schooling and employment — is also not well known in Canada.”

The task force cites Census Canada data which shows that Black workers tend to be overqualified for their jobs, work in low-level occupations and earn less money compared to non-racialized Canadians of the third generation or later.

The task force also recommended that LGBTQ workers comprise a new group under the law. One million people in Canada identify as LGBTQ and they account for four per cent of the total population.

A ‘disturbingly recent history’ of persecution

The task force report says LGBTQ workers have endured a “disturbingly recent history” of persecution. They were demoted or forced to resign for engaging in same-sex relationships, says the report.

“The Government of Canada has acknowledged and apologized for the fact that throughout the Cold War Era, from the 1950s through to the early 1990s in Canada, federal government employees faced a systematic campaign literally to purge them from the federal public service,” the report says.

The task force also is proposing replacing the terms “Aboriginal Peoples” and “members of visible minorities” with “Indigenous Peoples” and “racialized people” in the legislation.

The senior government source told CBC News that the “first step” the government will undertake is further consultation with affected communities, unions and employers on how best to implement the task force recommendations. Then, the Liberals will introduce legislation.

The task force report notes that women remain a group facing barriers that require removal. But it cites claims that progress with workplace equity has tended to benefit white women more than Indigenous or other racialized women.

“Early employment equity implementation has tended to focus on including women as a category without paying sufficient attention to diversity within the category of women,” the report says. “The need to approach the category of women in a disaggregated and intersectional manner was stated poignantly by many of the stakeholders who appeared before our task force.”

Ottawa announced the employment equity task force review in 2021. Its 12 members consulted Canadians, employer and worker organizations, civil society groups, experts and public sector representatives on modernizing the employment equity legislation that applies to all federally regulated workplaces.

More than 1.3 million people are employed in federally regulated industries and workplaces — about six per cent of Canada’s workforce.

Among other recommendations, the task force says parliamentary employees and public sector workers who operate abroad should be covered by the Equity Act.

Penalties too low, report says

Since the murder of George Floyd in U.S. police custody in 2020, the use of equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) training and practices has increased in workplaces. But the report said EDI should not eliminate the need for robust legislation.

“Voluntary measures alone will not work to bring equity to Canadian workplaces,” it said.

The report says that penalties for violating the act are too low and are rarely levied.

“Our task force was informed that only four employers have ever received a notice of assessment of a monetary penalty,” the report says. “We learned that the last penalty was issued in 1991, which is also when the largest penalty was issued — $3,000.00.

“Someone needs to be making sure that reasonable progress is actually occurring, with a view to achieving and sustaining employment equity that is properly resourced and effectively structured to avoid incentivizing non-compliance. Employment equity must not be sacrificed to wishful thinking.”

The task force calls on the federal government to establish an independent equity commissioner who would report to Parliament.

The commissioner would take over tasks from the Canadian Human Rights Commission, whose “tiny” employment equity division can’t keep up with the oversight work, the report says.

The commissioner should have a separate budget, guaranteed in legislation, that reflects the number of employers in federally regulated sectors.

“It is time to break out of the idea that equity work should be done on a nickel and a dime,” the report says. “If we are committed to championing employment equity in this global moment of rising intolerance, if we understand how critical substantive equality is to our workplaces, our economy as a whole and our identity as Canadians, we must show it.”

Source: Ottawa backs listing Black and LGBTQ workers under Canada’s workplace equity laws: source

Filed under Aboriginal, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Dispatch from the Front Line: We need an antidote, not more poison in a blue bottle

2023/12/12 Leave a comment

Good commentary from the Line (Jen Gerson and Matt Gurney). If you haven’t subscribed already, you may wish to consider doing so given the relevance and overall balance in their discussion of various issues:

No politician should need to be told this to have a bone-deep understanding of it. A politician’s personal feelings about any of these groups or events is irrelevant; they understand that once elected, they represent more than just themselves. These rituals are necessary to social cohesion. 

Likewise, no politician should need to be told the symbolism of not showing up for one of these groups. Of cleaving one religious minority from the herd. 

We cannot remove one without damaging the polity as a whole. This politician doesn’t show up for the Jews; the next one won’t show up for the Muslims. The one after that makes a public stink about Pride; the fourth scores points with his base by abstaining from Christian events, and so on. And so on. When politicians shirk their duty to represent the polity as whole, they instead become instruments of power for specific groups within that polity. 

Where does that lead us? 

When we lose a shared national identity that recognizes us primarily as individuals and citizens, what’s left is democratic tribalism. We revert to more ancient forms of identity — race and religion. Democracy becomes a matter of managing the interests of competing power blocs built on immutable characteristics like skin colour and on irresolvable sectarian divides. Absent a shared identity, it’s all just will to power, and the crass use of violence, bureaucracy, and capital to dominate other sub-groups. 

This is the outcome that white nationalists openly seek. They’ve done the math, and they believe that if white people understand themselves primarily as White People, then this majority tribe will begin to operate in the interests of a narrow ethnic identity rather than a shared national one. 

Ironically, this is also the outcome sought by many identitarian leftists as well, who seem to believe that will to power is an accurate reflection of our democracy right now. We at The Line disagree; friends, our politics gets so much worse if we continue down this path. This will become a self-fulfilling prophecy if we allow it to be. 

Both the extreme right and the extreme left understand that cleaving Jews from the polity is an effective way to shatter the experiment of postmodern nationhood. Of course it’s the Jews. It’s always the Jews. A perpetual religious minority in all nations on earth save one, the Jews have served as scapegoats for internal grievance for centuries. 

This is why growing antisemitism is such an alarming signal of trouble historically. It’s a sign of a society that has fallen into a state of deep spiritual and moral confusion. That red warning light is blinking bright and fast on the Canadian dashboard right now. 

This is not the outcome that your Line editors want for ourselves or our children. We believe in liberal democracy; we believe in the story of Canada, and the ability of this concept of a nation to bind disparate peoples. You know us mostly through our work, but if you knew us personally as well, you’d know that we love and are loved by people of different ethnicities and faiths — something that may not have been possible a few generations ago, and for which we are deeply grateful is possible today. If we backslide, we might lose those gains, and our kids may have a harder time enjoying the kind of lives we both grew up thinking were normal.

It’s not too late to pull ourselves from this brink, as long as enough of us understand that we’re upon it. 

Source: Dispatch from the Front Line: We need an antidote, not more poison in a blue bottle

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Dowd: The Ivy League Flunks Out

2023/12/11 Leave a comment

Good sharp commentary:

I was still kvelling about earning my Ivy League degree when the glow of that parchment dimmed.

On Tuesday, the presidents of Harvard, M.I.T. and the University of Pennsylvania put on a pathetic display on Capitol Hill when they were asked if calling for genocide against Jews counted as harassment.

It depends, they all said. Penn’s Elizabeth Magill offered a chilling bit of legalese. “It is a context-dependent decision,” she told Representative Elise Stefanik, a Republican from upstate New York. 

Not since Bill Clinton was asked about having sex with Monica Lewinsky and replied, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” has there been such parsing.

It’s hard to be on Stefanik’s side, given that she epitomizes the grotesque transformation of the Republican Party to an insane Trump cult, but she was right to pin down the prevaricating presidents.

Citing a Washington Free Beacon report, Stefanik noted in The Wall Street Journal that Harvard has cautioned undergraduates that “cisheterosexism” and “fatphobia” helped perpetuate violence and that “using the wrong pronouns” qualified as abuse.

When Stefanik asked Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, whether calling for the genocide of Jews constituted bullying, Gay said it could, “depending on the context.”

I felt the same disgust with the Catholic Church sex scandal, seeing church leaders who were charged with teaching us right from wrong not knowing right from wrong. University presidents should also know right from wrong. As left-wing virulence toward Jews collides with right-wing virulence, these academics not only didn’t show off their brains, they didn’t show their hearts. (Magill resigned on Saturday.)

“I think the inability of these individuals to articulate a simple, straightforward answer to what should have been the easiest question in the world was mind-boggling,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, told me. “It’s like a hurricane of hate in the last few months. You ask yourself, how is this happening? Now we know.” He added, “The truth is that these presidents are not committed to free speech. They’re committed to favored speech. They selectively enforce the codes of conduct when it works for them or their friends in the faculty lounge.”

Leon Wieseltier, the editor of Liberties, a humanistic journal, has an essay on antisemitism in the next issue, echoing Greenblatt with a complaint about the “selective empathy” that made kaffiyehs “cool.”

“I think this is still America,” Wieseltier said, “but what is so wounding and intolerable is how we went from spending four years intensely and rightly focusing on one class of victims in society, and now are prepared to make light of the troubles that another class of victims are experiencing.

“The culture on campuses is a culture of oppressors and oppressed. Israel is now Goliath and no longer David — though God knows it has mortal enemies capable of the most astonishing savagery. The Jews were long ago stricken from the rolls of the oppressed because they are seen as white and privileged. We are a culture which loves victims and worships victimization and gives great moral authority to victims, but we don’t treat all victims equally.”

The U.N. women’s rights agency and social justice groups grossly delayed condemning barbaric sexual attacks on women by Hamas during its Oct. 7 massacre.

Wieseltier also put blame on the authoritarian Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. “One of the reasons for this war is the Israelis’ decades-long neglect and humiliation of the Palestinians,” he said. “They thought it would never come back and bite them. Netanyahu plays right into the left’s false analysis of Israel as a colonial settler state.”

As James Carville told Bill Maher: “How the hell am I still looking at Netanyahu’s stupid, crooked, ignorant, negligent face? This guy’s still in power after the greatest intelligence failure at least since 9/11?”

Roger Cohen wrote in The Times that Netanyahu let Hamas grow stronger while taking a “‘kick the can down the road’ approach” on a two-state solution. As the Palestinian issue vanished from the global agenda, Palestinian fury grew.

That is no excuse for what Hamas did on Oct. 7, but Oct. 7 is also no excuse for Israel’s relentless bombing in Gaza.

I think this is still America. But I don’t understand why I have to keep making the case on matters that should be self-evident.

Why should I have to make the case that a man who tried to overthrow the government should not be president again?

Why should I have to make the case that we can’t abandon Ukraine to the evil Vladimir Putin?

Why should I have to make the case that a young woman — whose life and future ability to bear children are at risk — should not be getting persecuted about an abortion by a shady Texas attorney general?

Why should I have to make the case that antisemitism is abhorrent?

Source: The Ivy League Flunks Out

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

The Hamas-Israel War Obliterated the Campus Microaggression – The Daily Beast

2023/12/11 Leave a comment

One of the better commentaries from a free speech advocate following the disastrous testimony to congress by Ivy League university presidents:

…

A culture of free speech can lead to hurt feelings or a sense of unsafety. But it is not a “tool of the oppressor,” it is a righteous principle—like due process—that earns its strength by being applied to both the minority and majority, the popular and the unpopular, the righteous and the wrong.

Colleges can choose to do away with their overbroad speech codes and systems of discipline that lack due process or consider intent, nuance, and context. Or they can keep them, and defer to the feelings of the offended.

But what is clear is that you can’t have it both ways. For the authority to police speech to hold any legitimacy, it must be applied universally, and not excluded when the aggrieved are pro-Israel Jews. (Once again, there’s a word for that.)

I’ve argued this relentlessly over the years, but principled support for free speech is always under siege by the side that thinks the other has gone “too far”—so it’s worth repeating again: Do not demand fallible authorities to be the arbiters of acceptable discourse, because you will not always be favored by the authorities.

Many on the progressive left are shocked to find themselves and their allies labeled as unacceptably “problematic.” It’s a situation they could not previously conceive—but they should have. Real free speech advocates have been warning of this very situation the entire time.

The only way to ensure that your own ideas won’t be shut down when they are unpopular is to support—and demand—a culture of free speech, which does not include the right not to be offended.

Source: The Hamas-Israel War Obliterated the Campus Microaggression – The Daily Beast

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With Islamophobic incidents on the rise, Muslim Canadians are worried 

2023/12/09 Leave a comment

Of note:

Clearly, people are hurting, and will need time to heal. In the meantime, we should allow people to express their deep pain and loss in a humane way. Perhaps this will open a window for Muslims, Jews, Arabs, Palestinians and Israelis to recognize their common humanity, thus forging bonds of mutual respect here. Finding meaning in adversity is the foundation of resilience, which all communities will need going forward.

Sheema Khan is the author of Of Hockey and Hijab: Reflections of a Canadian Muslim Woman.

Source: With Islamophobic incidents on the rise, Muslim Canadians are worried 

Filed under Antisemitism, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with

Paul: What Is Happening at the Columbia School of Social Work?

2023/12/09 Leave a comment

Wokeness run amok….:

During orientation at the Columbia School of Social Work at Columbia University, the country’s oldest graduate program for aspiring social workers, students are given a glossary with “100+ common terms you may see or hear used in class, during discussions and at your field placements.”

Among the A’s: “agent and target of oppression” (“members of the dominant social groups privileged by birth or acquisition, who consciously or unconsciously abuse power against the members or targets of oppressed groups”) and “Ashkenormativity” (“a system of oppression that favors white Jewish folx, based on the assumption that all Jewish folx are Ashkenazi, or from Western Europe”).

The C’s define “capitalism” as “a system of economic oppression based on class, private property, competition and individual profit. See also: carceral system, class, inequality, racism.” “Colonization” is “a system of oppression based on invasion and control that results in institutionalized inequality between the colonizer and the colonized. See also: Eurocentric, genocide, Indigeneity, oppression.”

These aren’t the definitions you’d find in Webster’s dictionary, and until recently they would not have been much help in getting a master’s in social work at an Ivy League university. They reflect a shift not just at Columbia but in the field of social work, in which the social justice framework that has pervaded much of academia has affected the approach of top schools and the practice of social work itself.

Will radicalized social workers be providing service not just based on the needs of their clients but also to advance their political beliefs and assess clients based on their race or ethnicity?

When a student group, Columbia Social Workers 4 Palestine, announced a teach-in about “the significance of the Palestinian counteroffensive on Oct. 7 and the centrality of revolutionary violence to anti-imperialism,” Mijal Bitton, a Jewish spiritual leader, asked on X, “Imagine receiving services from a Columbia-educated social worker who believes burning families, killing babies, and gang-raping women is a ‘counteroffensive’ and ‘revolutionary violence [central] to anti-imperialism.’” Administrators barred the event from the school, but organizers held it in the lobby on Wednesday. Ariana Pinsker-Lehrer, a first-year student, set the protesters straight. “You’re studying to be social workers,” she told the group, “do better.”

Since the time of the pioneering activist and reformer Jane Addams, social work has been guided by a sense of mission. Social workers, who are the most common providers of mental health care, as well as the people who carry out social service programs, help the country’s neediest people. Whether social workers are caseworkers in government agencies or — as is the case with most Columbia graduates, I was told — therapists or counselors in private practice, their clients are often the elderly, the poor, veterans, homeless people, people with substance abuse issues and domestic violence survivors.

According to the National Association of Social Workers, “The primary mission of the social work profession is to enhance human well-being and help meet basic and complex needs of all people, with a particular focus on those who are vulnerable, oppressed and living in poverty.”

Other leading schools, like the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice at the University of Chicago and the School of Social Work at the University of Michigan, have embraced social justice goals but without as sharp an ideological expression as Columbia.

The Columbia School of Social Work updated its mission statementin 2022 to say that its purpose is “to interrogate racism and other systems of oppression standing in the way of social equity and justice and to foster social work education, practice and research that strengthen and expand the opportunities, resources and capabilities of all persons to achieve their full potential and well-being.” What was once its central mission — to enhance the world of social work — now follows an emphatic political statement.

Melissa Begg, the dean of the Columbia School of Social Work, said that while the school’s mission has always been about social justice and “equitable access,” its mission has evolved because “racism is part of the country.” The school, she explained, is trying to build an awareness of and give students the tools they need to address a diverse range of needs. As she put it, “If you think of slavery as the original sin of the United States, it makes sense to center that reality as part of the school’s mission.”

In 2017 the Columbia social work school introduced a framework around power, race, oppression and privilege, which the school called PROP. This began as a formal course for all first-year students to create what Begg referred to as “self-awareness.” In subsequent years, the PROP framework was applied to the entire curriculum of the school, and the PROP class became a required course called Foundations of Social Work Practice: Decolonizing Social Work.

According to the course’s current syllabus, work “will be centered on an anti-Black racism framework” and “will also involve examinations of the intersectionality of issues concerning L.B.G.T.Q.I.A.+ rights, Indigenous people/First Nations people and land rights, Latinx representation, xenophobia, Islamophobia, undocumented immigrants, Japanese internment camps, indigent white communities (Appalachia) and antisemitism with particular attention given to the influence of anti-Black racism on all previously mentioned systems.”

As part of their coursework, students are required to give a presentation in which they share part of their “personal process of understanding anti-Black racism, intersectionality and uprooting systems of oppression.” They are asked to explain their presentation “as it relates to decolonizing social work, healing, critical self-awareness and self-reflection.” Teachings include “The Enduring, Invisible and Ubiquitous Centrality of Whiteness,” “Why People of Color Need Spaces Without White People” and “What It Means to Be a Revolutionary,” a 1972 speech by Angela Davis.

This decolonization framework, in which people are either oppressor or oppressed, often viewed through the prism of American ideas around race, is by no means exclusive to the Columbia School of Social Work. But its application in the program illustrates the effects of the current radicalism on campus and the ways in which those ideals can shift an entire field of practice.

Addressing race should be an important part of a social worker’s education, as it is in many social sciences. The history and practice of psychotherapy, related to social work, was long infected with insidious and harmful ideas around race, which were often tightly bound to the eugenics movement and characterized African Americans and other minorities as mentally deficient and childlike; current practitioners are by no means immune to racism themselves.

Caregivers need to be sensitive to the effects of racism and other biases on their clients’ health and well-being. But professional organizations have become much more dogmatic about those concerns in ways that endanger the effectiveness of social work.

The National Association of Social Workers now stipulates that “antiracism and other facets of diversity, equity and inclusion must be a focal point for everyone within social work.” In October, Thema S. Bryant, the 2023 president of the American Psychological Association, published a column titled “Psychologists Must Embrace Decolonial Psychology.” In it she wrote, “Decolonial psychology asks us to consider not just the life history of the individual we are working with but also the history of the various collective groups they are a part of, whether that is their nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion or disability.” The profession, she explained, needed to include a range of goals, from appreciating “Indigenous science” to shaping “systems and institutions” in addition to individuals and families.

Psychotherapy already carries a certain amount of political or ideological bias. A number of recent surveys have shown that mental health practitioners, including social workers, tend to be overwhelmingly liberal, progressive or socialist, according to a new book, “Ideological and Political Bias in Psychology,” edited by Craig L. Frisby, Richard E. Redding, William T. O’Donohue and Scott O. Lilienfeld.

“Until roughly five years ago, people seeking mental health care could expect their therapists to keep politics out of the office,” Sally Satel, a practicing psychotherapist and the author of “PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine,” wrote in 2021. “Mental health professionals — mainly counselors and therapists — are increasingly replacing evidence-driven therapeutics with ideologically motivated practice and activism.”

“White patients, for instance, are told that their distress stems from their subjugation of others,” Satel wrote, “while Black and minority patients are told that their problems stem from being oppressed.”

Take counseling, which is similar to social work in its focus on mental health but ostensibly focuses more on individual therapy and less on navigating support systems, for example, obtaining assistance from public agencies. The code of ethics adopted by the American Counseling Association in 2014 states that “counselors are aware of — and avoid imposing — their own values, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors. Counselors respect the diversity of clients, trainees and research participants and seek training in areas in which they are at risk of imposing their values onto clients, especially when the counselor’s values are inconsistent with the client’s goals or are discriminatory in nature.” But the next year, the association’s governing council endorsed guidelines on “multicultural and social justice counseling” that stipulate “social justice advocacy” and divide clients and providers into “privileged” and “marginalized” categories meant to guide professional engagement.

Therapists are supposed to be able to listen and not be judgmental about feelings and ideas that are taboo, Andrew Hartz, a New York-based psychologist, told me. It’s not helpful for patients to feel judged by their practitioner: “Even if the goal is to make the patient less racist, it’s not effective.”

This past summer, Hartz founded the Open Therapy Institute to provide training without ideology so neither clients nor therapists would feel judged for their beliefs. “I was trained in the city and in city hospitals, so I saw mostly nonwhite patients,” he said. If he had used the current decolonization framework or categorized his patients by ethnicity and race, he explained, it would have distracted him from being an effective resource. “I’m trying to think about ‘What are they feeling and how can I help them?’ Not ‘I’m an oppressor, and they’re a victim,’ and so I’m walking on eggshells. That’s not going to be good therapy.”

Social workers help a broad range of populations, one in which race and systems of oppression often play less of a central role than individual counseling and support in navigating complicated social service systems — Syrian refugees in need of resettlement and Appalachian residents navigating health care insurance, foster children, survivors of domestic violence, teenagers grappling with substance abuse and poverty. They work with military veterans, victims of natural disasters, police officers suffering from workplace stress and the elderly. The job requires long hours dealing with populations that others have largely written off — the homeless, the formerly incarcerated, the infirm.

Like many helping professions — nursing, elder care, teaching — social work is not only one of the noblest vocations; it’s also one of the least remunerative. While the two-year residential program at the Columbia School of Social Work costs an estimated total of $91,748 a year with room and board, the median annual salary for its 2021 graduates, per a 2022 survey, was $62,000. (The school does not provide full information on how many students receive financial aid.)

Many students go to social work school because it’s often a less expensive route to becoming a psychotherapist in private practice, which many do as a licensed clinical social worker. It’s less expensive and faster than getting a doctorate in psychology or psychiatry. It’s also hard to pay off those student loans working in a governmental agency. More students are entering private practice, Begg acknowledged, as did everyone else associated with the school; several characterized it as an overwhelming majority.

The intention of the current curriculum at the Columbia School of Social Work, Begg emphasized to me, is to prepare social workers for hard work, not to shut out prospective students with any kind of ideological litmus test. The glossary of terms handed out at orientation, she said, was created by students for students and was not a “public-facing document.” She wanted to “make a clear bright line between our curriculum and our glossary.”

It’s supposed to be used “internally by our community within the context of a conversation” and as a “jumping-off point for conversation” for students to “expand their horizons.”

That noble intention may not be matched in practice.

Social work education has always been tied to social justice, said Amy Werman, who graduated from the Columbia School of Social Work in 1982 and has been teaching clinical and research courses there since 2009, full time since 2015.

But in the past few years, she said, the student body has become more radical. “Many students see themselves as social justice warriors, and protesting is the litmus test of being a real social worker,” she told me. She said she couldn’t remember a single protest at the school when she was a student. “Now,” she said, “I feel it’s a rite of passage.”

On Nov. 8, about a month after Hamas slaughtered about 1,200people in Israel, dozens of students occupied the school’s lobby, banging on drums and yelling “Intifada! Intifada!” from 10:30 a.m. until early evening. Several Jewish students told Werman they didn’t feel safe. Students I spoke with said they thought that the blatantly political slant of the PROP curriculum encouraged the radical tenor of recent student activism.

“I lead with my Jewish identity and my identity as a woman, my subjugated identities,” said Werman, who discusses in orientation and in class her experience in Israel providing social services to Bedouins, Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews, even after students have complained about her discussion of Israel in their evaluations of her.

“When Jews speak up in our school,” she said, “they are met with, ‘You have white privilege, so shut up. You are a colonizer. You are an oppressor. You are responsible for the deaths of innocent Palestinians.’”

When Asaf Eyal, a 2017 graduate of the school and now the director of a major New York City human services organization, arrived on campus, he said, he was bombarded immediately with messages from both the curriculum and from fellow students about his privilege as a white colonizer.

During the school’s required class in power, race, oppression and privilege (an earlier rendition of the course on decolonizing social work), Eyal, a former combat soldier from Israel, was shown videos of Israeli soldiers in which they were labeled the oppressor. In classroom lessons, the oppressed, he said, were always Black people. “Do you know there are Black Israelis, Black Jews?” Eyal, who had worked with Ethiopian Jews, asked his classmates.

“The school is infected with a political agenda that should not be in place, especially on Day 1,” Eyal told me.

Now, he said, he questions the education he got there. “I don’t come into my shelter every day and think about who is the oppressed,” he told me. “I think about helping people.” In October, after four years volunteering on behalf of the school, Eyal resigned from his role overseeing fieldwork assignments.

“Is this a school of social work or an indoctrination agency for extreme ideology?” Eyal said. “We’re missing the purpose. It’s not our purpose.”

Source: What Is Happening at the Columbia School of Social Work?

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Articles of interest: Multiculturalism

2023/12/08 Leave a comment

Poll not surprising given events as debates over Israel Hamas war affect diaspora communities and risk social cohesion and inclusion among other articles.

Poll finds support for deporting non-citizens supporting hatred, terror; mixed feelings over Canada’s ‘diversity’

Of note and not surprising given the events:

It was only two months ago that Canada saw large, disproportionately immigrant-led demonstrations calling for the expulsion of “gender ideology” from public school curricula. As Enns said, there is a social conservatism among immigrant communities that isn’t always sympatico with Canada’s various progressive frontiers.

Source: Poll finds support for deporting non-citizens supporting hatred, terror; mixed feelings over Canada’s ‘diversity’

Highlights of the Leger poll:

MOST CANADIANS SEE THE STRENGTH THAT DIVERSITY BRINGS TO THE COUNTRY, BUT FEEL THERE ARE PITFALLS AS WELL.

  • 56% believe that some elements of diversity can provide strength, but some elements of diversity can cause problems/conflict in Canada.
  • Three-quarters (75%) believe that an individual who has non-permanent status while in Canada and publicly expresses hatred toward a minority group or expresses support for any organization listed by the Canadian government as a terrorist group should not be allowed to stay in Canada.
  • While 69% think that Canadian universities should be places where dissenting opinions can be aired and discussed in a civil and constructive manner, 48% actually believe they are places where this happens.

Source: Diversity in Canada

Tasha Kheiriddin: Canada, the land of imported ethnic conflicts

Of note:

In other words, leaders in all strata of civil society — politicians, business, and academia — have a lot of work to do if we want to diversity to enrich Canadian society instead of tear it apart. That starts by focussing on what Canada stands for, honouring its history and achievements, and ceasing the relentless ideological takedown of our country as a colonial, oppressive state. The reality is that most newcomers came here to escape regimes that perpetrate far worse oppression than Canada ever did. It’s time our leaders stood up and said so.

Source: Tasha Kheiriddin: Canada, the land of imported ethnic conflicts

Lederman: The war in the Middle East is creating new divides in CanLit

Sound advice:

Open letters may be performative, but they are also of value. People who are justifiably angry and anguished feel compelled to do something, say something. Writers and other artists especially feel the need to voice their views. But if a letter dismisses the value of human lives on either side – or calls into question (or ignores) sexual assault, please think about what you’re signing. Or posting.

Source: The war in the Middle East is creating new divides in CanLit

Khan: The loss of the Afzaal family reminds us what happens when hate goes unchecked

Agree:

During these unsettling times of rising Islamophobia and antisemitism, the verdict is a stark reminder of what happens when hate goes unchecked. We must be vigilant against the proliferation of ideologies that seek to drive us apart, while ensuring that each member of our society is not fearful for their personal safety.

The human spirit has the resiliency to overcome evil with good. Yumna’s school mural reminds us of the virtues we all share as we strive toward a just, compassionate society. That is her legacy. What will be ours?

Source: The loss of the Afzaal family reminds us what happens when hate goes unchecked

Chris Selley: The fever to cancel Egerton Ryerson has broken

Yes indeed:

I have argued before that Ryerson makes an absolutely ideal subject for a discussion about how to treat otherwise benevolent historical figures who espoused unfortunate views — which is to say most of them. Instead we got a mad rush to rename. The HDSB’s Ryerson Public School in Burlington became Makwendam Public School. “Pronounced muck-kwen-dum,” the board explained, it “is the … word for ‘to remember’ in the Anishinaabemowin language.”…

Clearly, however, the issue has come off the boil. No one is hounding the Toronto District School Board to rename Ryerson Community School, or the City of Ottawa to rename Ryerson Avenue, or the United Church to rename Ryerson Camp in Vittoria, on Lake Erie. And that’s symptomatic of a moral panic: It goes from zero to 60 and back to zero just as quickly.

Blessed are those who who can stand firm on their principles, and on the historical record, in the face of the statue-toppling iconoclasm that overcame Ontario two years ago. Blessed and vanishingly few

Source: Chris Selley: The fever to cancel Egerton Ryerson has broken

Africans are being slaughtered, but with no Jews to blame, the left shrugs

An inconvenient truth:

But at the “civil society” level, the reason is simple: the conflict doesn’t fit the left’s anti-colonial narrative. The oppressors are not white or white-adjacent. This crisis cannot be blamed on capitalism, the United States, or Jews. There is nothing for the left to gain, politically, by calling out a community that is part of its own coalition. So just like feminists stay silent when Jewish women are raped, progressives fail to stand up for Black Africans when they are massacred.

The crisis in Sudan exposes “intersectionality” for what it is: a big, fat anti-semitic lie. The hypocrisy is beyond belief. And the Masalit are the ones to pay the price.

Source: Africans are being slaughtered, but with no Jews to blame, the left shrugs

Au-delà de l’affaire Bochra Manaï 

The dangers of appointing activists:

Quand Bochra Manaï a été nommée commissaire à la lutte au racisme et aux discriminations systémiques à la Ville de Montréal, Valérie Planteassurait les Montréalais qu’elle avait été sélectionnée au terme « d’un processus très rigoureux » qui était « garant de la qualité de la personne qui avait été choisie » et que cette dernière savait qu’elle servait désormais une « institution » et comprenait bien « son [nouveau] rôle ».

Beaucoup de Montréalais s’inquiétaient en effet du fait que la principale intéressée s’était surtout fait connaître comme porte-parole du Conseil national des musulmans canadiens et qu’à ce titre, elle avait publiquement pourfendu la loi 21 sur la laïcité de l’État et le Québec tout entier, devenu, selon elle, « une référence pour les suprémacistes et les extrémistes du monde entier ». Pouvait-on vraiment penser que quelqu’un qui tenait quelques semaines plus tôt des propos aussi provocants et aussi peu objectifs (elle était allée jusqu’à associer la loi 21 aux attentats de Québec et de Christchurch, en Nouvelle-Zélande) allait se muer instantanément, par la magie d’une nomination, en commissaire impartiale ?

Le noeud du problème est là. On recrute des militants politiques pour en faire des fonctionnaires censés être objectifs et impartiaux et on s’étonne ensuite qu’ils soient demeurés avant toute chose… des militants.

Source: Au-delà de l’affaire Bochra Manaï

As incidents of hate speech rise, when can employers legally sanction workers? 

Useful info:

Incidents of Antisemitism and Islamophobia are drastically rising in Canada in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war and the employment-related legal implications are quickly emerging as many workers openly express their personal views and attend protests or rallies. What happens when their employers, or others, take offence?

Source: As incidents of hate speech rise, when can employers legally sanction workers?

Colby Cosh: Court of Appeal rejects idea that math test is racist

Good decision even if largely on process grounds:

The Court of Appeal has taken a very dim view of almost all of this, partly because the concerns about the test turned out to be completely overblown. Aspiring teachers were always allowed to keep writing the test as often as they liked until they passed. Privatized provision of the test meant that opportunities to retake were never more than a few weeks apart. And teachers could take a crack at the MPT at any point in their course of studies; they didn’t have to wait until they were facing the immediate pressures of the job market.

The divisional court didn’t take any of this into account before hitting the Charter of Rights detonator, even though the evidence then before it was statistically slender and concerned only first attempts at the MPT. (Moreover, in voluntary field trials of the test, many candidates didn’t provide racial labels at all, creating possible — nay, virtually inevitable — bias issues in those statistics.)

Source: Colby Cosh: Court of Appeal rejects idea that math test is racist

Amira Elghawaby victime d’actes islamophobes

Threading the needle on the Israel Hamas war but clarity on Merry Christmas:

Lorsqu’elle a pris connaissance de l’offensive surprise du Hamas contre Israël, au matin du 7 octobre,  Mme Elghawaby a été « choquée » par ces événements « douloureux », raconte-t-elle.  Mais le silence qu’elle a maintenu sur la place publique dans l’immédiat a été dénoncé par plusieurs.

Il a fallu attendre une dizaine de jours avant qu’elle ne publie une déclaration, une prise de parole qui ne mentionnait pas explicitement les attaques du Hamas. « Les communautés musulmanes me mentionnent que nous ne pouvons pas laisser le conflit israélo-palestinien rouvrir un chapitre aussi douloureux. L’héritage de cette période sombre est ravivé aujourd’hui », avait-elle alors fait valoir, faisant référence au « profond traumatisme » vécu au lendemain des attentats du 11 septembre 2001 aux États-Unis par les communautés musulmanes et arabes.

… Noël férié, du racisme ?
Est-ce que souhaiter « joyeux Noël » est raciste ? Sa réponse est claire : « Non, pas du tout. C’est beau d’être dans une société pluraliste. On a plusieurs religions et on veut comprendre tout le monde et leurs fêtes. » Elle mentionne en appui une chronique qu’elle a écrite dans les pages du Toronto Star en 2018, intitulée « Est-il acceptable de dire “joyeux Noël” ? Oui », où elle affirmait que dire « bonnes vacances » pour éviter toute référence religieuse n’était pas « une panacée » pour l’inclusion. 

Jeudi après-midi, le Bloc québécois a déposé aux Communes une motion condamnant la position de la Commission canadienne des droits de la personne. Elle a été adoptée à l’unanimité par les élus, à l’image de celle déposée la veille à l’Assemblée nationale du Québec.

Source: Amira Elghawaby victime d’actes islamophobes

Yakabuski: Rights commission’s humbug view of Christmas is just the gift the CAQ needed

Indeed. What were they thinking (or not):

…But hark! Out of the dark November sky, by what could only have been the grace of some higher power, this week emerged the gift of fate that Caquistes had been needing. It came in the form of a Canadian Human Rights Commission discussion paper that the CAQ seized on as a frontal attack on Christmas, allowing it to present itself as the defender of the faith against the woke zealots.

“Honestly, we’re going to continue to celebrate Christmas, and we’re not going to apologize for celebrating Christmas,” CAQ Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette insisted after the National Assembly voted 109 to 0 to approve a motion denouncing the CHRC paper. The offending tract referred to statutory holidays related to Christianity as examples of the “present-day systemic religious discrimination” that is “deeply rooted in our identity as a settler colonial state.”

Source: Rights commission’s humbug view of Christmas is just the gift the CAQ needed

Douglas Todd: It’s dangerous to bring modern-day blasphemy laws to the West

Valid concern:

Canadian senators have recommended it. An Australian state has already done it. And some Danish politicians are preparing for it.

They are all pushing new laws that would, in different ways, make it a criminal offence to mock a religion. Some now call it “religious vilification” — even while it used to be known as “blasphemy.” The subject is in the air more than ever this fall because of hot-blooded enmities arising in the wake of the Hamas-Israel war.

Canadian Sen. Salma Ataullahjan this month said she wants legislation to combat “mischaracterization of religious Islamic concepts.” Chris Minns, premier of New South Wales in Australia, just brought in a fine of up to $100,000 for anyone who “severely ridicules” a religious belief. Denmark votes in December on whether to ban “improper treatment of scriptures,” particularly Quran burnings.

As much as I personally oppose the ridiculing of religious beliefs or symbols, I also believe legislators need to approach this crucial issue of free expression with extreme caution. It is dangerous for any society to forbid people from casting profane aspersions, however offensive, on that which others consider sacred.

Source: Douglas Todd: It’s dangerous to bring modern-day blasphemy laws to the West

If diversity is our strength, then why are diaspora news outlets being silenced?

There’s a dangerously naïve sentiment among some that Canada’s pluralism is immune from erosion. 

But in reality, Canadians from virtually every nation on the earth, of every political persuasion and religion, living side by side in peace is not something that magically happens. It takes constant work, strong leadership and information to understand the context of plural (e.g. cultural, regional, etc) goals and grievances and to resolve tensions peaceably.

Non-biased, smart journalism has a big role to play in this regard. But with Canadian mainstream media outlets closing regional offices and firing international bureaus en masse, there’s virtually no consistent mainstream coverage of how Canadian policies or politics are being felt by Canadian diaspora groups. Instead, the primary source of coverage many rely upon to understand factors that might impact different groups are stories found by using Google to search for minority community media outlets, often called Canadian “ethnic media” or “diaspora media.”

However, after December 19, 2023, thanks to the Canadian federal governing Liberal’s bill C-18, that capacity will be eliminated. December 19 is the day the bill comes into force, and the megalithic search engine Google said they would begin blocking search results for all Canadian news sources, including ethnic media. Google’s move will come months after Facebook’s parent company, Meta, blocked access to Canadian news sites across its platforms

Source: If diversity is our strength, then why are diaspora news outlets being silenced?

After ‘Sinicization’ of Islam in Xinjiang, China is closing and destroying mosques in other Muslim areas: report 

Telling:

“I do think it’s been quite shocking to see the lack of outrage from Muslim governments, which are quite rightly critical of what is happening now in Palestine and have also come to the defence of the Rohingya in the past,” Ms. Pearson said. “What we want to do is really open the eyes of Muslim-majority countries to what is happening in China.”

Source: After ‘Sinicization’ of Islam in Xinjiang, China is closing and destroying mosques in other Muslim areas: report

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