Rubin: False Messiahs, How Zionism’s dreams of liberation became entangled with colonialism

2024/01/09 Leave a comment

Well worth reading:

…

Are Jews “indigenous” or settler colonialists in Palestine? They are both. The Jewish people originated in this land, and after two thousand years of exile, they developed an ideology and a political rather than purely religious movement of “return.” But their historical memory was not shared by the land’s inhabitants. The historical memory of the Jewish people did not create the right or capacity to confiscate or occupy a single dunam of land against the will of its possessors. The historical memory of one people, however tenacious, creates no right to rule over another.

Israeli Jews are settler colonialists with a historical memory of indigenous origin. This includes the Jews who fled or were expelled from Arab and other Muslim countries. They were indigenous to the region but not to Palestine, except in their own historical memory. That historical memory distinguishes Israel from other settler colonial states. So does the fact that the nation founded through settler colonialism has no “mother country” to which its members might return, as the French did from Algeria. Today’s settlers in the West Bank and the Golan Heights could indeed return—their “mother country” is Israel—but the same is not true of the citizens of Israel as a whole. They cannot return to the scenes of the Holocaust or to the Arab and Muslim states that expelled them. Great Britain, and then the United States, played the role of mother country by conquering the land, facilitating its settlement, and arming the settlers, but they have assumed no responsibility for the fate of Jewish refugees—whether from Hitler, from the persecution of Jews in Iraq in the early 1950s, or from a future conflagration in Palestine.

Instead, the Zionist movement and the Jewish state succeeded in building a new nation that is now indigenous to the land—though to what parts of the land, and with exactly what rights, is the core of the dispute over whether Israel is an apartheid settler state. The question “does Israel have the right to exist?” could have been meaningfully debated before the state existed, but now the only answer is, “Israel exists.” As a member of the United Nations, it has the right to continue to exist and to exercise the right to self-defense against other states. According to the UN charter, it also has the right to defend its territorial integrity, but implementation of that right requires defining the borders of the State of Israel. This depends on a peace settlement recognizing Palestinian national rights. Only such a settlement can establish Israel’s security as a state.

Genesis is not destiny. Documenting the historical fact that Israel came into existence in part through Zionism’s collaboration with colonialism does not mean that the only solution is a “decolonization” that would destroy the state and expel its inhabitants. What is objectionable about colonialism is not the immigration or settlement of a population of a different ethnic or national origin, or of people that are in some sense non-indigenous, but the domination of one group over another. It is impossible to rewind and rerun history. But it is possible, indeed necessary, to assure a future where Palestinians and Israelis have equal rights. Both peoples must be able to participate in choosing the government that rules them. Palestinians and Israelis must live either in two sovereign, equal states, or in one state as individuals with equal rights. The international consensus (excluding the government of Israel) in favor of the former—and the apparent impossibility of Israelis and Palestinians sharing a common sole polity—make the former the apparent choice….

Barnett R. Rubin is Distinguished Fellow at the Stimson Center and Non-Resident Senior Fellow at NYU’s Center on International Cooperation. His books include Afghanistan from the Cold War through the War on Terror (2013) and Blood on the Doorstep: the Politics of Preventing Violent Conflict (2002). His writing has also appeared in Foreign Affairs, The New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books.

Source: False Messiahs, How Zionism’s dreams of liberation became entangled with colonialism

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

McWhorter: Claudine Gay Was Not Driven Out Because She Is Black

2024/01/09 Leave a comment

Of note:

Since Claudine Gay’s resignation as president of Harvard University on Tuesday, it has become an article of faith among some of her supporters and other observers that she was targeted, criticized and essentially driven from the job largely because of her race. The idea is that the people who questioned her abilities and academic integrity — be they Harvard donors who found fault with her leadership after Oct. 7 or conservative activists who led an inquiry into plagiarism in her scholarly work — were marked and even motivated by animus toward a Black woman attaining such a degree of power and influence.

The Rev. Al Sharpton denounced Gay’s resignation as “an attack on every Black woman in this country who’s put a crack in the glass ceiling.” Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, wrote that the attacks against Gay “have been unrelenting & the biases unmasked.” Harvard’s Corporation, or governing board, noted the “repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol.” And Gay herself, writing in The Times last week, referred to “tired racial stereotypes about Black talent,” and described herself as an “ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety” due to her status as “a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution.”

But I don’t think the notion that racism was substantially to blame for Claudine Gay’s trouble holds up.

As both Gay and Harvard note, she received openly racist hate mail. This is repulsive. But however awful it must have been for Gay to endure their abuse, those people did not force her resignation.

Nor does it seem that Gay was ousted on the basis of her race in the aftermath of her Dec. 5 testimony before Congress on the topic of antisemitism on campus. Of three university presidents who attended, only one resigned under duress shortly after the hearing, and she — Liz Magill of Penn — was white.

No, the charge that ultimately led to Gay’s resignation was plagiarism, of which more than 40 alleged examples were ultimately unearthed. And plagiarism and related academic charges have of course also brought down white people at universities many times. Ward Churchill was fired from the University of Colorado for academic misconduct, including plagiarism, in 2007 in the wake of his controversially assailing people working in the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 as “little Eichmanns.” The president of the University of South Carolina, Robert Caslen, resigned thanks to a plagiarism episode in 2021. And the president of Stanford, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, resigned due to questions of data manipulation just last July.

For many, the central issue seems to be that Gay’s plagiarism would not have been uncovered at all were it not for the efforts of conservative activists, which is true. The question then is whether the people who led the charge to oust Gay from her job — principal among them the right-wing anti-critical race theory crusader Christopher Rufo and the billionaire financier and Harvard donor Bill Ackman — were acting out of racial animus, or even an opposition to Black advancement.

And here things get slightly more complicated. Rufo and Ackman are unabashedly opposed to what both perceive as an ongoing leftward drift at elite universities such as Harvard. And both are opposed to the D.E.I. — or “diversity, equity and inclusion” — programs that are increasingly prominent on campuses, within corporations, and elsewhere. According to Ackman, D.E.I. is “not about diversity” but rather is “a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed.” Rufo and Ackman both believed that, in accordance with the precepts of D.E.I., Gay had been appointed as Harvard president more for her skin color than for her professional qualifications.

To analyze this position as mere racism, though, is hasty. No one is trading in “stereotypes” of Black talent by asking why Gay was elevated to the presidency of Harvard given her relatively modest academic dossier and administrative experience. It was reasonable to wonder whether Gay was appointed more because she is a Black woman than because of what she had accomplished, and whether this approach truly fosters social justice. There was a time when the word for this was tokenism, and there is a risk that it only fuels the stereotypes D.E.I. advocates so revile.

To put it succinctly: Opposing D.E.I., in part or in whole, does not make one racist. We can agree that the legacy of racism requires addressing and yet disagree about how best to do it. Of course in the pure sense, to be opposed to “diversity,” opposed to “equity” and opposed to “inclusion” would fairly be called racism. But it is coy to pretend these dictionary meanings are what D.E.I. refers to in modern practice, which is a more specific philosophy.

D.E.I. programs today often insist that we alter traditional conceptions of merit, “decenter” whiteness to the point of elevating nonwhiteness as a qualification in itself, conceive of people as groups in balkanized opposition, demand that all faculty members declare fealty to this modus operandi regardless of their field or personal opinions, and harbor a rigidly intolerant attitude toward dissent. The experience last year of Tabia Lee, a Black woman who was fired from supervising the D.E.I. program at De Anza College in California for refusing to adhere to such tenets, is sadly illustrative of the new climate. (Like Ackman, she believes that what he calls the “oppressor/oppressed framework” of D.E.I. contributes to campus antisemitism by defining Jews as “oppressors.”)

D.E.I. advocates may see their worldview and modus operandi as so wise and just that opposition can only come from racists and the otherwise morally compromised. But this is shortsighted. One can be very committed to the advancement of Black people while also seeing a certain ominous and prosecutorial groupthink in much of what has come to operate under the D.E.I. label. Not to mention an unwitting condescension to Black people.

Try this thought experiment: Harvard appoints “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo to become the new president of Harvard. She comes equipped with the strongest D.E.I. credentials imaginable, but with a very slender academic record. Do you imagine that conservative activists would sit back contentedly, merely because she’s white?

Or take a non-hypothetical example: After a successful tenure as the president of Smith College, Ruth Simmons became the first Black woman president of an Ivy League School when she took over Brown in 2001. Yet I am aware of no conservative crusade against her during her decade-plus in that office — despite the fact that she led a yearslong campuswide examination of the school’s role in the slave trade.

The idea that a menacing right-wing mob sits ever in wait to take down a Black woman who achieves a position of power is a gripping narrative. But its connection to reality is — blissfully — approximate at best. It is facile to dismiss opposition to modern D.E.I. as old-school bigotry in a new guise. The lessons from what happened to Professor Gay are many. But cops-and-robbers thinking about racial victims and perpetrators will help answer few of them.

Source: Claudine Gay Was Not Driven Out Because She Is Black

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , , , , ,

Conford: Israelis and Palestinians are both trapped by the dangerous fantasies of history

2024/01/08 Leave a comment

One of the best commentaries I have seen, thoughtful and balanced:

… For years, the right-wing in Israel – and Hamas in their way – have promulgated the notion that the peace process was an illusion, a mirage. But what events have shown is that the delusion, the Fata Morgana, was that there could ever be normality without finding a peaceful, negotiated settlement to the issue. Polls back in 1993 – before a cruel wave of Hamas suicide bombings and the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin undermined belief in the possibility – had support for a peace treaty among both Palestinians and Israelis running above 65 per cent.

Since then, the far right in Israel and Hamas have shared the same goal: to put a halt to any possibility of the peaceful division of the land into mutually recognized stable states of Israel and Palestine. Even in the past few weeks, Mr. Netanyahu has boasted how he has stopped a Palestinian state from coming into existence in the past and how he will also in the future, arguing that the Hamas attack shows why he is right to do so.

It is exactly this thinking which has brought us to where we are now.

The sole way to escape the cycle of violence is to clearheadedly renounce all the maximalist and eliminationist fantasies and the dehumanizing caricatures that have led, and will continue to lead, to the horrifying shedding of the blood of thousands of men, women and children….

M.G. Conford is the writer and director of the documentaries Through The Eyes Of Enemies, Not On Any Map, and Fragments of Jerusalem. He is an associate professor of film at Toronto Metropolitan University

Source: Israelis and Palestinians are both trapped by the dangerous fantasies of history

Filed under Antisemitism, foreign policy, Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , ,

Globe editorial: When protests become acts of intimidation

2024/01/06 Leave a comment

Well said:

This cannot stand. Supporters of the Palestinian people have every right to express their views and to protest actions by Israel, but they have no right to intimidate and to threaten people on the street, on campuses, in theatres or in neighbourhoods. To tolerate such misbehaviour is to encourage much worse actions that inevitably follow. Enough.

Source: When protests become acts of intimidation

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Rioux: La peur des mots

2024/01/06 Leave a comment

Surprising he didn’t mention “pregnant people” or “people who menstruate” as another example, or perhaps these terms have not crossed the Atlantic to France. In line with Orwell’s famous essay, “Politics and the English Language”:

La fonction des mots n’est-elle pas de dire les choses et de le dire avec le plus de clarté et de précision possible ? Longtemps, ceux qui font métier d’écrire ou de parler ont entretenu le culte du mot juste. Il s’agissait d’éviter les idées floues et les phrases imprécises. Et avec elles, ces mots qui cultivent l’imprécision, le vague ou la vacuité.

On ne m’en voudra pas de déflorer cette nouvelle année en mettant en garde contre un certain nombre de ces mots qui pullulent malheureusement dans nos médias. Car, depuis un certain nombre d’années, on a vu se multiplier ces expressions dont la fonction n’était pas de dire les choses avec précision, mais de le dire avec le plus de flou possible. Soit que leurs locuteurs souhaitaient dissimuler leurs pensées, soit qu’ils aient craint d’éventuelles représailles. À moins qu’ils n’aient tout simplement rien eu à dire, se contentant d’ânonner les expressions à la mode. Cela existe.

Malheureusement pour ces derniers, les mots, eux, ne mentent pas. Après la COVID-19, le SRAS et l’Ebola, l’épidémie du mot « personne » est certainement l’une des pires qu’on ait connues depuis longtemps. Pas une journée sans que la radio et la télévision, sous prétexte d’« inclusivité », ne nous entretiennent de « personnes handicapées », de « personnes hospitalisées » ou de « personnes itinérantes ». Sans oublier ce summum absolu de toutes ces lapalissades : la « personne humaine » !

Ce n’est pas un hasard si, à l’origine, le mot personne désignait un masque de théâtre. N’est-ce pas ce mot qu’utilisa d’ailleurs Ulysse pour tromper le Cyclope ? Voilà pourtant qu’un petit malin — probablement payé au mot — a décroché le Graal en inventant la formule « personne en situation de ». Nous voilà donc affublés de « personnes en situation de handicap », de « personnes en situation d’hospitalisation » et d’« élève en situation d’échec ». À quand la personne « en situation de bêtise » ou « en situation de sottise » ? À ce rythme, il faudra bientôt des périphrases interminables pour nommer les choses les plus simples. Tout pour mettre à distance la réalité : celle des « handicapés », des « malades » et des « cancres » !

Ces circonvolutions linguistiques ne sont pas que de simples tics de langage. Elles participent de cette rectitude politique que certains, comme l’écrivain Allan Bloom, identifièrent dès les années 1980. Cette mauvaise conscience des élites protestantes américaines est devenue depuis une véritable maladie dégénérative qui atteint tout particulièrement la langue.

J’ai tendance à penser que c’est par cette perversion du vocabulaire — qui crée en quelque sorte des « safe spaces » linguistiques où l’on ne risque plus d’être importuné par la réalité — que le wokisme a lentement gagné en influence sans faire de bruit, jusqu’à gangrener nos universités et nos médias. Car qui gagne la bataille des mots gagne la guerre.

Prenez cette recrudescence du mot « inapproprié » qui pollue les ondes et les pages des journaux. Non content d’être la plupart du temps un anglicisme (« inappropriate »), le mot semble fait sur mesure pour incriminer quelqu’un sans avoir à dire si son attitude était simplement déplacée, impolie, indécente, carrément abjecte, violente ou même criminelle.

On retrouve le même flou artistique sciemment entretenu dans ce qu’il est dorénavant convenu de nommer les « inconduites sexuelles ». Quel mot pratique pour accuser quelqu’un sans avoir à dire de quoi. La formule semble avoir été récupérée dans un manuel de bienséance de la bonne société victorienne. Elle désigne aussi bien une farce grivoise qu’un viol. On la dirait inventée par des avocats afin de jeter l’opprobre sans être accusé de diffamation. 

Mais ce qu’on sent surtout dans ces expressions, c’est une peur panique du monde réel. La peur de toucher la réalité des choses ou de « flatter le cul des vaches », aurait dit avec sa bonhomie habituelle l’ancien président Jacques Chirac. Il sera toujours plus rassurant de regarder le monde à travers un écran.

En France, on ne compte plus les formules qu’utilisent les médias pour ne pas nommer ces endroits que l’immigration de masse a transformés en ghettos. Les voilà qualifiés de « quartiers », de « cités », de « banlieues », de « périphérie », de « zone » ou de « territoire ». Que de créativité afin de dissimuler la réalité toute simple et d’éviter la critique.

Ce même désir de ne pas nommer le monde explique la soudaine recrudescence du mot « haine ». Il a notamment servi à dissimuler l’explosion, pourtant amplement documentée, de l’antisémitisme un peu partout dans le monde à la suite de l’attentat du 7 octobre contre Israël. La haine a beau être « l’hiver du coeur », disait Hugo, elle peut recouvrir tout et son contraire. Car il y a des haines légitimes. À commencer par celle de cette langue de bois, à la fois technocratique et idéologique, incomprise de la majorité, que nous assènent nos nouvelles élites à coup de « flexitariens », d’« écoanxiété », de « féminicides » et autres formules alambiquées.

« Ce que l’on conçoit bien s’énonce clairement, et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément », disait Nicolas Boileau. Cette bataille des mots peut sembler insignifiante, elle est pourtant au coeur des combats d’aujourd’hui. Bonne année quand même.

Source: La peur des mots

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

ICYMI: Ottawa will prevent AI tools from discriminating against potential hires, Anand says

2024/01/03 Leave a comment

Of note:

The federal government will work to prevent artificial intelligence from discriminating against people applying for jobs in federal government departments, says Treasury Board President Anita Anand.

In a wide-ranging year-end interview with CBC News, Anand acknowledged concerns about the use of AI tools in hiring.

“There is no question that at all times, a person’s privacy needs to be respected in accordance with privacy laws, and that our hiring practices must be non-discriminatory and must be embedded with a sense of equality,” Anand said when asked about the government’s use of AI in its hiring process.

“Certainly, as a racialized woman, I feel this very deeply … We need to ensure that any use of AI in the workplace … has to be compliant with existing law and has to be able to stand the moral test of being non-discriminatory….

Source: Ottawa will prevent AI tools from discriminating against potential hires, Anand says

Filed under Government, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Articles I found interesting during the holidays

2024/01/02 Leave a comment

As always, lots of articles on immigration with a continuing stream of voices raising concern regarding current levels of permanent and temporary migration. The National Bank flagged an economic contraction, per capita GDP basis also noted by TD, driven partly by an immigration-fuelled populations increase (Canada’s high immigration is driving down per-capita GDP: report). 

Tristin Hopper correctly noted that the immigration surge cancels out every Liberal housing promise and then some: Canada’s biggest immigration surge in 70 years, while Konrad Yakabuski, citing the Bank of Nova Scotia (« L’immigration est excessive. Point à la ligne ») argues that L’immigration [est] le talon d’Achille de Justin Trudeau. Brian Lilley notes that  Canada has added more than 1 million people and counting in 2023, it’s unsustainable. Meanwhile, while Canada has massive growth, South of the border it is only an uptick, Immigration fuels uptick in US population growth.

Tony Keller continues his series of critiques on immigration, arguing for drastic cutbacks in the number of low-skilled temporary workers, sharp cuts in the number of international students and ending the right of students to work while in school, Can we talk about immigration?

Cam Clark notes that the “failure to control the unplanned boom in temporary residents … is already undermining one of Canada’s great strengths: public support for immigration,” Liberals risk aiding Trump-style politics with temporary-resident failures. Julia Malott observes that the  International student influx exposes the selfish greed of universities, although she fails to note provincial policies failures, particularly in Ontario, that have driven universities in this direction.

Minister Miller continues his tendency of being much more frank than any of his predecessors (“I’m trying to target the effect of a system that’s run a bit rampant for far too long…), signalling that he will ‘rein in’ number of temporary foreign workers.

Le Devoir had a good explainer on current policies and debates in Quebec, Comment parler d’immigration en famille sans se fâcher, along with flagging ongoing IRCC operational issues, Délais à IRCC: Des milliers de réfugiés privés de voyager, même dans l’urgence.

The Star also had a good comparative explainer, Canada, the U.K. and Australia all face immigration challenges. Why Canada’s going a different way. The question is, of course, should Canada go a different way!

Immigration advocates Naomi Alboim, Audrey Macklin and Anna Triandafyllidou argue that Canada’s program to legalize undocumented migrants should be simple and comprehensive forgetting that simple and comprehensive are oxymorons in immigration policies given the practicalities and politics.

Rita Trichur wrote an interesting article on the strengths and weaknesses of TD’s racial equity audits, noting that auditors with racial expertise, comprehensive coverage of all business aspects and be public.  TD Bank’s racial equity audit offers lessons for other public companies

On citizenship, the first generation cut-off for transmission of citizenship was struck down by the courts (‘Lost Canadians’ win in Ontario court as judge ends 2 classes of citizenship – CBC.ca), with Chris Selley: ‘Lost Canadians’ beat Ottawa in court over Charter violations that never should have happened. Not as straightforward a change. Most of the plaintiffs had a route to citizenship for their children, albeit not as convenient as an automatic one. Will see if the government appeals (it should IMO as the decision opens the door to automatic transmission across multiple generations).

The release of the government’s Employment Equity Act Review Task Force late 2023 provides insights into the government’s thinking given that it set the terms of reference for the review and related consultations. The government has already signalled its support for the terminology changes of Indigenous peoples and racialized people, along with creation of a new designated group for 2SLGBTQI+ and the separation for Blacks from the overall racialized people group. While the former addresses a long-standing gap, the latter appears driven more by political considerations given the paucity of evidence presented in the Task Force Report in contrast to other groups, as my earlier analysis of hiring, promotion and separation rates demonstrate.

Meanwhile, from the right, Peter Shawn Taylor argues that It’s Time to Abolish the Absurd (and Slightly Racist) Concept of “Visible Minorities”

Interesting article by Pamela Paul on how social media disadvantages Blacks and Hispanics, who spend more time on social media than whites, Does Social Media Perpetuate Inequality?

Filed under Citizenship, Immigration, Multiculturalism

Looking back on 2023 and forward to 2024

2024/01/02 Leave a comment

Best wishes to all for 2024.

The major development this year has been a sharp reversal in attitudes towards immigration, given the ongoing increases until 2025 of permanent residents and the much larger increases in temporary workers and international students and the consequent impact on housing avilability/affordability, healthcare and infrastructure. 

When I first started raising these and other concerns some five years ago (reviewing Doug Saunders Maximum Canada) and subsequent articles), I was largely a voice in the wilderness. But now, it seems that every week there is another article pointing out the fallacies and problems with the current approach, with virtually all polls showing a significant drop in public support.

Federal and provincial governments, business stakeholders, organizations like Century Initiative and other immigration advocates have largely been caught flat footed by this change given their almost ideological fixation an aging population, their particular interests, and a blindness to broader implications.

While the federal government scrambles to adapt to public concerns on housing, none of the overdue changes to increase housing will have a material impact before the next election. 

The one area I expect to see a meaningful rethink in 2024 is with respect to international students and the “puppy mills” of private colleges to use Minister Miller’s words. Whether the government will similarly restrain or cap temporary foreign workers will be another test of whether it is more attuned to general public and productivity concerns or to business interests in having a larger labour pool for lower skilled workers, along with other special immigration interests.

Most of my time this year was spent on citizenship issues, analyzing citizenship operational data to better understand the declining naturalization rate, opposing the proposed self-affirmation of the citizenship oath and my annual update on birth tourism (non-resident self-pay). 

The petition I launched to oppose the change to the oath and for a return to more in-person ceremonies along with related commentary by others received largely a non-response by the government although it remains to be seen whether they will implement the proposed regulatory change (Minister Miller appears more aware of the importance of citizenship meaningfulness than his predecessor).

Other areas included analysis of employment equity hiring, promotion and separation data, indicating that the government continues to make progress in increasing the representativeness of the public service, annual update of Order of Canada diversity, and a census-driven analysis of riding level demographic, economic and social characteristic.

Next year will likely be more of the same given some of the annual data that I follow. While I will continue my monthly statistical updates, will trim some of the data that has proven less significant (e.g., web traffic) or overtaken by events (e.g., RCMP interceptions given expansion of the STCA).

Top 10 Posts on www.multiculturalmeanderings.com: 

Articles and citations

Citizenship 

Citations

Immigration 

Citations

Multiculturalism, Diversity and Employment Equity

Citations

Political Representation 

Citations

Filed under Citizenship, Immigration, Multiculturalism

Best wishes for the holidays and the New Year

2023/12/16 Leave a comment

See you in 2024

Filed under Multiculturalism

Phillips: How Muslim voters are exerting their growing political influence

2023/12/16 Leave a comment

Another number: Canadian Jews from more than 5 percent of the population in 13 ridings compared to Canadian Muslims forming more that 5 percent in 114 ridings:

But the Trudeau government surely didn’t need much encouragement to move in that direction, and it didn’t necessarily have to do with geopolitical calculations. You only have to look at changing demographics in this country and their far-reaching political implications.

This can be touchy territory, so let’s specify a couple of things upfront.

There’s nothing wrong with any community, including Muslims, organizing to maximize their political impact. That’s as Canadian as butter tarts. Virtually every group has done it — from the English and Irish to francophone Quebecers, Ukrainians, Italians, Sikhs, you name it.

And ethnic voting doesn’t explain everything about this or any issue. You don’t have to be Muslim to be appalled at the death toll in Gaza, no more than you have to be Jewish to be sickened by the massacre of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7.

But in this case, there’s no ignoring the increase in Muslim voters. A few numbers: the 2001 census showed there were 579,000 Muslims in this country (or 1.95 per cent of the population). The most recent census, in 2021, put that number at 1.77 million (4.9 per cent).

That’s a dramatic rise. By contrast, Muslims are only an estimated 1.1 per cent of the U.S. population, meaning their relative demographic weight in Canada is almost five times as large.

Another relevant comparison: in 2001, Canada’s Jewish population was put at 330,000. The 2021 census measured it at 335,000 — virtually the same. So while the country’s Jewish population flatlined, its Muslim population tripled….

But no party can ignore the new reality. Demographics, they say, are destiny. And right now they’re showing Muslim voters must be taken seriously.

Andrew Phillips is a Toronto-based staff columnist for the Star’s Opinion page. Reach him via email: aphillips@thestar.ca

Source: How Muslim voters are exerting their growing political influence

Filed under Multiculturalism, Politics Tagged with , , , , ,

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