Immigration is religion’s only hope – UnHerd

2023/09/21 Leave a comment

Of interest (similar trend in Canada):

When my father was going through the process of becoming an Elder in the United Methodist Church, he was required to take courses on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. One course involved a presentation on how white people needed to make room for, and amplify the voices of, “people of colour”. My father is an immigrant from China. He, like other immigrant preachers, was confused about who the term “person of colour” referred to, and why a faith founded on the idea that there is “neither Jew nor Greek” is so obsessed with racial divisions.

Who can blame them? The progressive ideology that in recent years has swept through mainstream American Protestantism is often impenetrable to those from non-Western countries.

And yet, it is just such immigrants who are keeping Christianity alive in our secular world — everywhere from France’s Afro-Caribbean megachurches to London’s Black Majority Churches. In America, the number of citizens identifying as Christians has fallen from 90% to 64% in the last 50 years, while immigrants are becoming more influential: more than two thirds of them are Christians.
American progressives are increasingly stoking fears of an incipient “white Christian nationalism” bringing about a Cromwellian theocracy. But white Americans have actually been secularising at a slightly faster rate than other ethnicities. While black Americans have also experienced secularisation, they are still more likely to go to church and pray than the average American. And African immigrants to the US are more religious than American-born black people. The rise of Latino evangelicals in America has also been receiving mainstream coverage.

“Conservative Christians”, the bogeyman for white progressives, are therefore increasingly likely to be people of colour — the very people whose voices progressives apparently want to amplify. Christians of African origin are far more likely to hold conservative views on sexuality, while Latino evangelicals are quickly becoming a Republican bloc.

White conservatives, meanwhile, have a tendency to bemoan the secularisation of the West and the decline of traditional values, while supporting restrictive immigration processes — perhaps not realising that non-Western immigrants are more likely to be socially conservative than American-born citizens, or perhaps because their economic or tribal instincts trump their religious ones. Both progressives and conservatives are therefore mired in contradiction.

Despite the fact that liberals are secularising faster than conservatives, for the last decade, the leadership of the United Methodist Church has been adopting views on sexuality and gender identity that are in line with those of secular progressives, triggering a slow-motion denominational schism. Some years ago, I attended a UMC conference with my parents at which some attendees wore rainbow armbands in support of a movement to ordain gay clergy. Almost all of them were white. None of the representatives from immigrant congregations, and few from black congregations, wore the armbands. “Before I came to America, I thought this was a nation built on Christian values,” commented one attendee. “Why are these people going against God’s will?”

A progressive Christian might see this as a contradiction: if Jesus came from Heaven to help the marginalised, why do these marginalised Christians antagonise a fellow marginalised group? Liberal white people, who usually preach multicultural ideals, cannot answer this question honestly without making it sound like Western culture has the “correct” view on sexuality — the major irony being that progressives dismiss Western culture for what they see as regressive views.

While progressives blame “the Christian Right” for society’s ills, religious conservatives often complain about “woke Christianity”. They point to examplessuch as Allendale United Methodist Church, which had a “non-binary” drag queen deliver sermons and bills itself as “a church that is committed to anti-racism and radical solidarity with folx on the margins”. They argue that such acts are based on ideology stemming from the secular world rather than theology based on Biblical exegesis.

A similar dynamic can be observed in the UK. Earlier this year, the Church of England floated the idea of using gender-neutral pronouns for God, and allowed prayers of blessing for gay couples. The backlash was swift. Many bishops in Africa and Asia rejected the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury — and criticised the Anglican church’s (largely white) leadership. But even within the UK, there was fierce opposition to progressive Christianity from ethnic minorities, who are keepingBritain’s Christian population from declining.

However, the religious conservatives probably have less to worry about than the progressives, in the long run. If progressive Christian churches align themselves more closely to the values of secular society than to religious ones, they will cease to exist. A similar phenomenon can be seen in American Judaism. Orthodox Jews, who take their faith seriously, and mostly vote Republican, are currently in the minority, but they are estimated to grow to become the dominant branch of American Judaism by 2050. This is partly due to birth rates, but also because non-Orthodox Jews, who mostly vote Democrat, are secularising quickly; they are far more likely to partner with non-Jews, stop observing Jewish traditions, or to cease to identify as Jewish altogether. Christianity, too, looks set to depend on the most orthodox sustaining the faith.

It is ironic that Christianity is now seen as “problematic” by progressives, because the roots of liberalism, which opened the door for progressivism, partially derive from Christianity — or Protestantism, to be specific. It was the Reformation that shifted religious practices away from a central authority to that of individuals. As Tom Holland has pointed out, almost every country that has legalised gay marriage has been shaped by centuries of both liberalism and Protestantism.

It is also ironic that white progressives support multiculturalism over assimilation, because it is the latter that would align the beliefs of immigrant communities with the values of the utopia dreamed of in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion trainings. In other words, though liberalism paved the way for immigration and multiculturalism, immigration and multiculturalism actually weaken liberalism; though Christianity paved the way for liberalism, Christianity could prove liberalism’s downfall.

The tension between a multicultural utopia pushed by secular progressives versus the socially conservative, religious-inflected attitudes many non-white groups hold has led to quite a few awkward skirmishes. While most black people vote for the same party as white liberals, 37% of black Democrats say their religious views influence how they think about transgender topics, compared to only 11% of white Democrats. While 66% of black Democrats say a person’s gender is their sex determined at birth, only 27% of white Democrats say the same.

Conservatives in America are also tying themselves in strange knots. A common refrain is that Islam is incompatible with Western civilisation. And yet, some conservative Christians find themselves allied with Muslims against what they both see as America’s decadent hyper-individualistic secular culture. In a number of American cities, Muslims have joined conservative Christiansto protest the inclusion of explicitly LGBT-themed books in elementary schools, leading to accusations that “some Muslim families” are “on the same side of an issue as White supremacists and outright bigots”. To progressives, a “bigot” is a stereotypical white Christian conservative; to see non-white Muslim families standing beside them in droves caught many off guard. An all-Muslim city council in Michigan was once held up by liberals as a symbol of diversity, until it voted earlier this year to ban Pride flags being flown on city property, to the delight of many social conservatives. Slate has gone so far as to call Muslim voters “the new Republicans” — an unexpected twist after two decades of Republican fear-mongering against Islam.

At the same time, presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, a Hindu, has gone from a virtual unknown to third place in the Republican primary, by picking up the support of many conservative Christian voters. Ramaswamy does not shy away from his faith, but rather emphasises the similarities between certain schools of Hindu and Christian thought. Many conservative Christians, it seems, would rather ally with conservatives from other religions than Christians on the other side of the political divide.

It has taken a cosmic convergence of contradictions to get to this point. White progressives, with their absolute devotion to immigration, have inadvertently championed immigrants from cultures that outrightly reject progressivism. With their just-as-absolute devotion to multiculturalism, those same white progressives have created a trap for themselves where they are unable to criticise a non-white person’s culture, values or beliefs — even when they actively go against sacred progressive views on gender and sexuality. Meanwhile, white conservatives find themselves forging alliances with people they never thought they’d work with — people whose entry into the country they might have objected to. Old alliances are dissolving — and battle lines are drawn anew.

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , ,

Clark: Canada once more forced to reckon with era of foreign intimidation

2023/09/20 Leave a comment

One of many articles on the intelligence revelations that the Indian may have been behind the Canadian Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar:

It was a jolt for Canada when China retaliated for the arrest of a Huawei executive in Vancouver by locking up two Canadian bystanders, the two Michaels, five years ago. Now a second shock shows us foreign governments are continuing to reach into Canada to intimidate.

This time, agents of a supposedly friendly country, India, are alleged to be linked to the death of a Canadian, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh community leader who in June was shot in his truck in the parking lot of the Guru Nanak Gurdwara in Surrey, B.C.

There has never been anything like this before: an explosive public allegation that a foreign government’s agents targeted and killed a Canadian citizen, in Canada.

Certainly, there has never been a moment like the one on Monday afternoon when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stood up in the House of Commons to tell the country that Canada’s security agencies are pursuing “credible allegations” of a potential link to the Indian government.

India is not supposed to be an enemy, or even an adversary. There are tensions, because the Indian government has for decades accused Canada of being soft on Khalistani terrorists, who seek to carve an independent Sikh state out of what is now northern India. But India has often conflated non-violent Sikh separatist advocates with terrorists and extremists. Mr. Nijjar was organizing an unofficial referendum on the creation of a Sikh state when he was killed.

The idea that New Delhi might send agents to kill a Canadian in Canada is stunning.

Mr. Trudeau said on Monday that he had spoken to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi about the allegation “in no uncertain terms” at last week’s G20 summit in New Delhi, but there was no word from the Canadian government on Mr. Modi’s response. There’s no sense Mr. Trudeau was given a satisfactory answer, or that he was promised Indian co-operation on an investigation.

Canada has already expelled an Indian diplomat who was the chief of the Indian foreign intelligence agency in Canada, but it’s not clear what, if anything, will happen next.

Again, Canada is jolted into recognizing a new world in which foreign governments reach out to influence, intimidate and coerce Canadians in Canada. Again, there is new reason to believe foreign interference might be a bigger, broader danger than this country is prepared to counter. This time, the allegation is assassination, which underlines the direct threat to the security of Canadians – especially those who belong to diaspora communities here.

Already, many in Canada’s Sikh community believed that the Indian government had been involved in Mr. Nijjar’s killing, and his death had sparked anger and protests. Indian diplomats had complained to Mr. Trudeau’s government that those protests were becoming threatening. The killing brought tension to Canadian streets.

It wasn’t quite the same thing in 2018, when China arrested Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor in retaliation for Canada’s arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou on U.S. charges. But that was an attempt to intimidate Canada for exercising its own laws. It showed Canadians can’t expect sovereignty without foreign coercion.

And there have been more examples of China and other countries feeling they can reach inside Canada. The RCMP said earlier this summer that they had shut down illegal Chinese police activity in several Canadian locations. The Globe and Mail has reported on a series of attempts by Beijing to influence Canadian elections. Canadian relatives of victims of the 2020 downing of Ukrainian Airlines Flight 752 by Iranian armed forces reported that people close to the Iranian regime had approached them in Canada, in an attempt to intimidate them into silence.

Now, Mr. Trudeau has made an explosive, albeit unproven, allegation of an extreme example – an alleged assassination in Canada – and promised to work closely with allies “on this very serious matter.” In the Commons, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh called on allies to “condemn this violence … in the harshest terms possible.”

But it is far from certain that the U.S. and other Canadian allies will rush to hold India to account.

For one thing, credible allegations in the hands of intelligence agencies aren’t the same as evidence gathered by police for a trial. And in a world where Western allies have imposed extensive economic sanctions against Russia and are increasingly seeking to counter China’s influence, the U.S. and European nations won’t relish the prospect of conflict with another major power.

But if the allegation is true, it will be fuel for the coming public inquiry into foreign interference. Foreign governments apparently feel as though they can reach into Canada with impunity. Countering that is now a pressing national priority.

Source: Canada once more forced to reckon with era of foreign intimidation

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization, Religion Tagged with , ,

Girard: L’intégrisme religieux, une menace aux droits des femmes

2023/09/20 Leave a comment

A reminder:

De nombreux récents événements démontrent, sans équivoque, que l’intégrisme religieux constitue une menace à l’égalité des sexes ici et dans le monde. En voici quelques exemples : « À travers plus de 50 édits, ordres et restrictions, les talibans n’ont laissé aucun aspect de la vie des femmes indemne, aucune liberté épargnée. Ils ont créé un système fondé sur l’oppression massive des femmes qui est à juste titre et largement considéré comme un apartheid de genre », déclarait la directrice d’ONU Femmes, Sima Bahous, le 15 août 2023.

Nulle part ailleurs dans le monde, il n’y a eu d’attaque aussi généralisée, systématique et globale contre les droits des femmes et des filles qu’en Afghanistan. Tous les aspects de leur vie sont restreints sous le couvert de la moralité et par l’instrumentalisation de la religion. Les politiques discriminatoires et misogynes des talibans nient le droit des femmes à l’égalité.

Le 14 août 2023, on apprenait que le premier ministre d’Israël, Benjamin Nétanyahou, négociait, dans le cadre d’un accord avec des alliés ultraorthodoxes, des concessions qui pourraient transformer radicalement le visage d’un pays où l’égalité des droits pour les femmes est garantie dans la déclaration d’indépendance de 1948. Bien que les lois israéliennes n’aient pas encore été modifiées pour refléter ces concessions, d’aucuns craignent que ces changements soient déjà en cours, aux dépens des femmes.

Les médias israéliens ont ainsi fait état, ces derniers mois, d’incidents jugés discriminatoires : des chauffeurs de bus ont refusé de prendre de jeunes femmes parce qu’elles portaient des hauts courts ou des vêtements de sport ; des hommes ultraorthodoxes ont arrêté un bus public et bloqué la route parce qu’une femme conduisait ; le service national d’urgences médicales et de catastrophes a, pour la première fois, séparé les hommes des femmes pendant la partie théorique de la formation paramédicale entreprise pour répondre à une exigence du service national israélien.

Rappelons que lorsqu’il y a ségrégation basée sur le sexe, pour répondre aux souhaits des ultraorthodoxes, les femmes soit sont assises à l’arrière, soit ont accès à moins de financement, soit ont un choix de carrière limité. Les défenseurs des droits des femmes s’inquiètent également des efforts que fait le gouvernement israélien pour affaiblir la Cour suprême, qui, elle, a soutenu l’égalité des droits pour les femmes dans plusieurs domaines.

Le mouvement iranien « Femme, vie, liberté », commencé en septembre 2022 à la suite de la mort d’une jeune Iranienne de 22 ans, Mahsa Amini, dans le cadre de son arrestation par la police des moeurs pour « avoir mal porté son voile », a permis de mettre en relief les affronts aux droits des femmes perpétrés par la République islamique d’Iran.

Sa constitution même part du principe que la femme est une citoyenne de seconde zone, est légalement la propriété de l’homme et doit se conformer à une multitude d’interdits sous peine de sanction allant jusqu’à la mort. Interdits économiques, interdits d’aller et venir, interdits empêchant chacune d’elles de disposer d’elle-même. Selon le Code criminel iranien, la valeur d’une femme est égale à la moitié de celle d’un homme lorsqu’il est question de dédommagement pour un meurtre, lors de la séparation d’un héritage familial ou encore lorsqu’il est question du poids à accorder aux témoignages dans un cadre judiciaire ou dans un contexte de divorce. De plus, la République islamique d’Iran impose une ségrégation systémique entre les sexes dans les écoles, les hôpitaux, les transports, les sports et autres.

En 2022, aux États-Unis, les fondamentalistes chrétiens, très influents auprès de la droite américaine, obtenaient l’invalidation par la Cour suprême de l’arrêt Roe v. Wade, qui protégeait le droit à l’avortement à l’échelle nationale. Selon le juge dissident Stephen Breyer, cette décision aura pour conséquence de restreindre les droits des femmes et leur statut de citoyennes libres et égales.

Entré en vigueur en 2021 en Pologne, un arrêt de la Cour constitutionnelle, contrôlée par le parti conservateur nationaliste et catholique au pouvoir Droit et justice (PiS), interdit tout avortement sauf en cas de danger pour la vie ou la santé de la femme enceinte ou si la grossesse découle d’un viol. Dans la pratique, il semble cependant impossible d’obtenir un avortement, même légal. La Pologne devient ainsi l’un des pays européens les plus restrictifs en matière de droit à l’avortement.

Ici aussi

Le Canada n’est pas en reste concernant les dangers de l’intégrisme religieux. CBC News révélait, en juin 2023, l’existence d’un document stratégique de la Liberty Coalition Canada selon lequel elle veut recruter 10 000 nouveaux candidats politiques chrétiens afin de pouvoir aligner les lois canadiennes sur les « principes bibliques ». Or, le droit à l’avortement, qui fait consensus au sein de la population canadienne, fait partie de ses cibles. Après le succès obtenu par les lobbys religieux aux États-Unis, la vigilance est de mise ici aussi, au Canada, à l’égard du respect du droit des femmes à l’égalité.

Comme le disait si bien Simone de Beauvoir : « N’oubliez jamais qu’il suffira d’une crise politique, économique ou religieuse pour que les droits des femmes soient remis en question. Ces droits ne sont jamais acquis. Vous devrez rester vigilantes votre vie durant. »

Source: L’intégrisme religieux, une menace aux droits des femmes

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

Canada must better protect immigrants, refugees from foreign intimidation, report says

2023/09/19 Leave a comment

Yes indeed:

A new report by human-rights lawyers, released ahead of the public inquiry on foreign interference, says Canada must be prepared to take forceful action to protect those who are often the targets of these attacks: immigrants and refugees.

It says Canada is breaking its obligations under international law to protect those who start a new life in this country but often face intimidation and pressure from authoritarian governments they left behind in their homeland.

“Canada is legally obligated to protect people within its borders against certain human-rights violations arising from incidents of transnational repression, and there are legal frameworks and mechanisms available to Canada at the international and domestic levels to combat such incidents,” the report said.

“Despite this, the Canadian government has yet to sufficiently respond,” it added.

In order to combat this repression, the report urges Ottawa to cancel a long-standing treaty with China that obliges it to co-operate with Beijing on police and criminal investigations.

As Western intelligence agencies, including the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, have warned, Beijing has a history of using what are ostensibly anti-corruption campaigns, such as Operation Fox Hunt, to instead find and punish dissidents who have fled to other countries. Last fall, it was reported that China ran a network of illegal police stations in Canada and around the world.

Canada should end its 1994 treaty with China on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters, the authors say, referring to an agreement that allows Chinese or Canadian prosecutors to call upon investigators in each other’s country to help obtain evidence.

On Monday, Quebec Court of Appeal Justice Marie-Josée Hogue begins her term as commissioner of a public inquiry into foreign interference by China and other hostile states.

The inquiry follows months of reporting on Chinese foreign interferenceincluding revelations in The Globe and Mail on May 1 that Beijing targeted Conservative foreign affairs critic Michael Chong and his relatives in Hong Kong in the lead-up to the 2021 election. The disclosure of this meddling prompted Ottawa to expel Chinese diplomat Zhao Wei later that month.

The new report, Combatting Transnational Repression and Foreign Interference in Canada, was authored by international human-rights lawyers Sarah Teich, David Matas and Hannah Taylor.

It’s published by Human Rights Action Group as well as the Council for a Secure Canada. The report is endorsed by nine groups representing diaspora communities that fight transnational repression from countries including China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Ethiopia, Eritrea and others.

The report says that the various agencies and departments of the federal government need to work together to effectively combat transnational repression.

Canada needs not only a registry of foreign agents to track efforts to influence this country, it says, but also a commissioner of foreign influence to receive and investigate complaints: including alleged violations by foreign embassies and consulates.

The authors say Canada needs a dedicated hotline where targets of intimidation can call for help in order to co-ordinate a response and keep track of these repressions.

Canada should criminalize the offence of “refugee espionage” where foreign governments spy on those who have fled their homeland to settle in this country, they say. And, it should create a civil cause of action – a basis to seek judicial relief – specific to transnational repression so that diaspora groups have easier standing to sue foreign governments or agents in Canada working for them.

Ottawa should also train law-enforcement officers and campus security at universities to recognize and address cases of transnational repression, the report said.

In addition, it should commit to slapping targeted sanctions on foreign officials or entities found to be engaging in transnational repression, the report said.

Canada has a poor global reputation right now for tackling this form of foreign interference, the authors say. They noted that a report from Freedom House, a Washington-based advocacy group for civil liberties, concluded that mechanisms available to report incidents of transnational repression in Canada are inadequate, and that victims are often “disappointed by the lack of response from law enforcement.”

The authors of the new report say Canada is failing its obligations to protect people in this country from foreign-based repression, including under the 1954 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the 1951 Refugee Convention.

Most of the rights it’s obliged to protect are also listed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. These rights include the right to life; the right to be free from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; the right to liberty and security.

The report calls on Ottawa to create a specialized fund to provide physical, psychological and financial support for victims of transnational repression that can be used for needs such as emergency housing, physical and mental health treatment and new phones or laptops for those whose devices are hacked.

Source: Canada must better protect immigrants, refugees from foreign intimidation, report says

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Colby Cosh: Ontario math case is mirror-image racism disguised as racial sensitivity

2023/09/18 Leave a comment

Of note:

The Canadian Constitution Foundation announced in a press release on Thursday that it has been granted intervenor status in an appeal, approved a year ago but not yet scheduled, that will concern Ontario’s famous racist math test for teacher candidates. In 2018, as you might recall, the Ontario government, concerned about sluggish student math performance, introduced a new math proficiency test (MPT) that teachers would have to pass before being admitted to the profession.

The test was based on the kinds of questions that students in grades 3, 6 and 9 would themselves be expected to answer in a classroom, and it was checked closely for explicit indications of racial bias and sensitivity. Nevertheless, in both trials of the MPT and the first year it was given officially (2021), some groups of test-takers — notably candidates self-described as being of African, Caribbean and Indigenous descent — didn’t score quite as well as the white ones.

Yes, friends, it’s one of those “disparate impact” issues that is constantly raising the political temperature in the United States, but that we haven’t yet fought about much here. This is the struggle that has a chance of spreading the American race-panic infection when the Ontario Court of Appeal and perhaps the Supreme Court get around to hashing it out.

In late 2021, a hastily assembled “Teacher Candidates’ Council” brought an application for judicial review of the MPT on the grounds that it violated Section 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which forbids the state from racial discrimination. A panel of the Divisional Court, wielding novel Supreme Court doctrine on “disparate impact” cases, ruled that the MPT was discriminatory and struck down the statutory requirement for teachers to pass it.

The Divisional Court’s ruling is a truly dismal, laborious document: it exhibits a logic that the legal commentator Leonid Sirota has described as “Bonkerstown.” Section 15 says that the law cannot engage in “discrimination based on race,” and nothing in or about the test does that — except, well, that it’s a test. The court comments in the decision, as a matter of uncontested and universally recognized fact, that “Black and Latinx teacher candidates are much more likely to fail standardized teacher tests than their White peers,” and that standardized tests, perhaps by their very nature, “are biased against almost all vulnerable classes of potential teachers other than women.

Does this mean that any kind of state-administered proficiency test yielding a “disparate impact” is thereby outlawed? The ruling “disparate impact” case, Fraser v. Canada, dates only from the fall of 2020, and was written by, you guessed it, the now-retired Justice Rosalie Abella. Abella’s disparate impact doctrine, summarized helpfully at paragraph 57 of the Divisional Court ruling, says that the legislature’s intentions in writing a law are irrelevant, and that there is no need for a court to demonstrate or show how a law causes a disparate impact on racial groups. If there is any difference at all in the between-group outcomes of a law, Sec. 15 is activated.

This essentially throws disparate-impact questions in the hands of the classic Oakes test. In a given case, is there a sufficiently urgent and compelling reason for Sec. 15 to be violated? The Divisional Court agreed that the MPT was a way of addressing a “pressing and substantial objective” — improving the dismal math education in Ontario. The government’s choice to adopt the test was proportionate and rational: there is some evidence that teachers who do better on math tests themselves get better results from students. This takes us to the question of “minimal impairment,” which is the hurdle at which the MPT fell.

The Divisional Court panel acknowledged that high deference to lawmakers is required when it comes to “complex social problem(s) with many potential solutions.” As often happens, this high-flown language was a warning sign that the court wasn’t going to defer at all. The panel acknowledged that the government did what it could to mitigate the disparate effect of the test, screening it for biases and letting teacher candidates take it as often as they needed to. But the government did have alternatives to imposing the MPT at the end of teacher education. It could have added, and did consider adding, more math requirements and math courses to bachelor of education programs themselves.

The government was reluctant to do this, and preferred to have an MPT, because altering bachelor of education requirements would involve the province poking its nose into higher education and treading on the independence of universities. Moreover, there’s no real indication that this approach would necessarily be any better for education students who are bad at math exams. But simply because the MPT had been tried, and shown to yield disparate outcomes, the existence of a hypothetical alternative was enough to engage the “minimal impairment” part of the Oakes analysis in the eyes of the Divisional Court judges.

In short, you can’t say you minimally impaired the rights of racial minorities if there was anything else you could have done to uphold a training standard or a proficiency requirement. Nobody needs me to hector them about the grotesque nature of this chain of reasoning — which involves deciding that there are groups inherently bound not to cut the mustard on tests of their capability, and reading the Charter of Rights in a way that protects them from those tests. Most of you will see this as mirror-image racism disguised as racial sensitivity, and that’s just what it is.

Source: Colby Cosh: Ontario math case is mirror-image racism disguised as racial sensitivity

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Omidvar, Browder and Silver: Canada should honour Mahsa Amini’s memory by sanctioning her killers

2023/09/18 Leave a comment

Of note:

September 16 marks the first anniversary of the murder of Mahsa Amini in Iran. Those who killed her should be sanctioned by Canada.

Brutally beaten to death by Iranian authorities for not abiding by their strict restrictions against women’s autonomy and dress, Ms. Amini’s murder sparked global outrage and solidarity with the women of Iran.

Iranian women continue their brave campaign for freedom, unveiling themselves as acts of peaceful protest, knowing full well they may share the fate of Ms. Amini for doing so. Imagine their reaction when they learn that their torturers are visiting family in Toronto and vacationing in Vancouver.

In one of his first acts as Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, Marc Miller rightly recognized and redressed this injustice, banning Iran’s former health minister, a major rights violator, from his frequent visits to Canada. But this lets the bigger fish off the hook.

Ebrahim Raisi used to be called The Hanging Judge from his time personally overseeing executions of political prisoners. Mr. Raisi’s cruelty followed him into Iran’s presidency, where he is now crucial to the brutal crackdown against women. Canada’s allies have already sanctioned him for his crimes, making Canada a curious outlier.

Similarly, Iran’s Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution was recently sanctioned by the U.S. and U.K. for designing the regime’s anti-women laws and demanding their violent enforcement. The fact that its leaders can visit Canada at their leisure is an affront to the dignity and equality of Canadians, and sends the wrong message to Iranians.

Canada should instead be communicating solidarity and extending support for Iranians through its sanctions systems. The new law on asset repurposing, which was first proposed by World Refugee and Migration Council members Allan Rock and Lloyd Axworthy and advanced by us in Parliament, is perfectly suited to address the situation.

Seizing assets is the natural next step after freezing them, and Iranian victims are the obvious beneficiaries. For those struggling to rebuild their lives in Canada after losing limbs or loved ones to the torturers in Tehran, it would be poetic justice for them to receive the proceeds of assets their persecutors have hidden away in Canada.

We support the Atlantic Council Strategic Litigation Project’s proposal for Canada to create a fund for Canadian-Iranian victims, which would facilitate community involvement from coast to coast in the decision-making process. With a broad and inclusive board of directors cutting across the Iranian diaspora in Canada, the fund would ensure transparency and grassroots engagement in the distribution of seized assets for medical, material and psychosocial support to victims.

This fund will also draw out all those Iranian-Canadians with credible evidence of crimes perpetrated against them or their loved ones. This would allow Canada to document and build cases toward prospective prosecutions. In the same way Ukrainian refugees are being interviewed by the RCMP regarding Russian crimes, and Iraqis and Syrians about the Islamic State, Canada should be gathering evidence from Iranian victims in the country.

Sanctions and asset seizures are powerful forms of accountability and restitution, but prosecution should not be forgotten. Those Iranian rights abusers enjoying the freedoms in Canada that they deprive their compatriots of at home should be the ones sitting in prison. Even if they are not in Canada, or a perpetrator cannot be identified, the evidence gathered from victims could be used in other trials that might take place around the world.

Canada played a crucial role in setting up the continuing United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, which would benefit from the support of evidence gathered by Canadian investigators. Canada also leads the annual UN General Assembly resolution on Iran, which receives overwhelming support from around the world every year in calling out the crimes of the regime in Iran and expressing solidarity with its victims. When the General Assembly meets next week, Canada can use this global diplomatic platform to strengthen sanctions co-ordination and implementation, and build further global support for strengthening investigations of perpetrators.

For all the innocent women whose lives and liberties they have taken away, Canada can secure justice and send a global message that its borders, banks and businesses are closed to Iran regime criminals. We must honour Mahsa Amini’s memory, and the courage of Iranian women, in sanctioning or jailing their abusers. This important moment of commemorating her murder must not only be an act of remembrance, but a reminder that we must act.

Ratna Omidvar is an independent senator from Ontario who first proposed Canada’s asset repurposing laws in Parliament. Bill Browder is the head of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign. Brandon Silver is an international human rights lawyer and director of policy and projects at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.

Source: Canada should honour Mahsa Amini’s memory by sanctioning her killers

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

Brian Dijkema: Who left the barbarians in charge of our books?

2023/09/16 Leave a comment

Uncomfortable parallels between book banning by the right and left:

Today, the CBC broke a story that showed how the Peel District School Board is culling books that fail to meet “equity-based” criteria for books in school libraries. Among the books that are thrown away, according to reporter Natasha Fatah, is Anne Frank’s diary. While they are not quite going so far as to host a bonfire to burn the books in school parking lots, the end result is pretty much the same. The board is not giving the books away, they are literally throwing them into the landfill to moulder. What an absolute abomination.

This practice is not just some random “woke” librarian on a rampage either. It is being done in response to a directive from the Ministry of Education, whose current minister is Stephen Lecce, a conservative. It comes from straight from the top.

The policy is the mirror image of the “anti-woke” book policy of the conservative governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis. A list of books removed from Florida public school libraries shows plenty of books that are terrible and that really shouldn’t be on the shelves, but also plenty that are not just okay, but genuinely endearing and in line with the tradition of living books. Why should a sweet, rhythmic, story about a Thai mom trying to quiet the animals so her baby can sleep be put out of a school library? I can’t tell you. Arguably, the Peel Board’s practice is even worse, as it simply removed any book published before 2008.

While the policy has since been countermanded by Lecce’s office, these types of policies—one aimed at removing “woke” books and another one aimed at “non-inclusive” books are, sadly, a metaphor for the state of public education these days. The words that best describe this policy are brutal and barbaric.

By this I don’t mean that school administrators are clothed in fur and looking for blood (though, judging from other goings-on in the Peel board, you can be forgiven for this assumption). They are a clear attempt to cut off students from a living tradition of reflection on the beauty and complications of human life, in favour of a simplistic, ideological vision. The dearly departed Australian poet Les Murray describes the situation better in three lines than I could in three pages:

Politics and Art

Brutal policy,
like inferior art, knows
whose fault it all is.

This is the mentality shaping both the Left’s and the Right’s vision for educating our kids. Is this what you want for your kids? It’s not what I want for mine.

This is not to say that libraries shouldn’t make choices about what to put on their shelves. Those choices are both a practical and pedagogical reality and will depend in part on the type of person you are trying to form. Perhaps it’s time to give up the pretense that forming our kids is something a system that self-articulately takes a pass on deeper questions of meaning and formation can do. Given the fact that two ostensibly “conservative” premiers have given North America two perfectly opposite, but equally brutal, policies on the literature that will shape our children’s imaginations, perhaps it’s time to find a new lens for evaluating education.

And that lens, I should add, cannot simply be the technocratic one that our governments prefer. The culling of books based on ideological differences on sex or race or what have you is nothing compared to the culling of real, living, books that have been taking place in our libraries for years in the name of value-free technological “progress.” In many libraries—both public and school—books that would have once sparked flames of imagination in life in young children have been replaced by Chromebooks and electronic learning games or other bits of metal and silicon that are, literally, planned for obsolescence rather than for posterity. The beautiful, “eye on the object” look of children reading has been replaced by catatonic faces more often found in front of slot machines in a casino.

The fact that the minister’s office issued a directive without offering clear criteria by which a book would be deemed to be “inclusive, culturally responsive, relevant, and reflective of students” (or even a definition of what it means by these extremely vague terms) is an abrogation of duty. A read of the audit reports produced by Peel indicates that this technocratic mindset is the greater concern for those of us concerned with education as something intended to shape humans, rather than technically proficient machines. It cloaks terms and actions that have significant import for the formation of children in administrative bureaucratese and is executed almost entirely by staff who are accountable to no one in particular, and certainly not Ontarian parents.

Whether it’s ridding shelves of books like the Diary of Anne Frank in Ontario under Lecce, or Brother Eagle, Sister Sky under DeSantis, policies like this are another step in the alienation of children from the complexities of history and humanity. Even if this all is, as my friend Michael Demoor suggests, simply a case of bureaucratic stupidity brought on by the hugeness of the school boards (a view that is plausible, but which doesn’t deal with the very real and clearly articulated ideological nature of Ontario’s common school system, nor its increased centralization over the last few decades), it’s a stretch to say that this is a healthy way the system should be working. Overreach and bluntness of this sort are, as they say, a feature, not a bug, of systems where education is controlled by a bureaucratic state and massive, largely unaccountable, school boards.

Perhaps this might give all of us—regardless of which colour you vote for in a given election—some pause, and a desire for something better.

A month or so ago I was corresponding with the ever-so-gifted Mary Harrington about her recent book (reviewed here in The Hub) and mentioned that I appreciated how many of the concerns she raised in the book fit into an old-school “left-wing” model of politics. Her reply was enlightening. She said, “I don’t have a problem with being recognised as a leftist in some respects; it’s true, and besides I’m not sure the terms really apply anymore, as the split these days is more human vs posthuman.”

This, I think, is precisely where we need to be on education. Another word for brutal is inhumane. Both the Left and the Right are acting like barbarians and pushing a vision of education that is destroying our shared past and the reflections of human beings trying to make sense of the world. It has to stop. It’s time for a more humane, human-scale, vision of education. But to achieve that, humanists—of all political persuasions—will need to unite.

Source: Brian Dijkema: Who left the barbarians in charge of our books?

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Nicolas: Quand on «débat» de toi

2023/09/15 Leave a comment

Interesting parallel between the Charte des valeurs québécoises, and the tensions it provoked for visible minorities, and the current discourse around trans and non-binary and how this high profile debate adversely affects teenagers. And the irony, or symmetry, having the same minister, Bernard Drainville, responsible for both:

Ça aura fait dix ans, le 10 septembre dernier, que le projet de « Charte des valeurs québécoises » fut présenté à l’Assemblée nationale. La nouvelle avait eu l’effet d’une bombe dans mon cercle d’amis. Nous avions vingt et quelques années, notre expérience en mobilisation politique et sociale allait bien au-delà de notre âge, et nous étions déterminés à défendre l’idée d’un Québec « ouvert » ou « inclusif ».

En moins de deux semaines, nous avions cherché l’appui de regroupements juifs, musulmans et sikhs, puis rassemblé 5000 personnes au centre-ville de Montréal pour une manifestation où nous scandions notamment que « le Québec n’est pas la France, vive la différence ». Charles Taylor, déjà d’âge vénérable, avait escaladé devant nous la boîte de notre pick-up de location pour prononcer un discours passionné dont la force était directement puisée dans l’énergie de la révolte. Pour moi, qui n’avais vu l’homme que dans son rôle de « sage » aux audiences télévisées de la fameuse commission sur les accommodements raisonnables, l’image était saisissante.

Le poids de l’actualité était, bien sûr, le plus lourdement porté par les minorités religieuses, les femmes musulmanes, en particulier. Ce qui était plus difficile à prévoir, c’est que bien des alliés allaient aussi recevoir le projet de loi comme une attaque personnelle. Certains ont vu dans la « Charte » une attaque à leur conception des valeurs québécoises ou aux droits et libertés, de manière plus générale. D’autres ont vu un coup de couteau dans leur rêve d’un Québec indépendant et le signe d’un virage vers un nationalisme qui n’allait jamais pouvoir toucher le Québec dans toute sa diversité, ni même la génération montante.

Le sentiment de peur, lui, était ressenti avec le plus d’acuité par mes amis qui, comme moi, sont des enfants d’immigrants. Certains appartenaient à des minorités religieuses, d’autres non. Parce qu’« autre » aux yeux de la majorité, on se disait tous qu’un gouvernement qui s’attaquait ainsi aux droits d’un groupe minoritaire pouvait s’attaquer à n’importe quel autre groupe demain, dont le nôtre. Ce raisonnement était rarement explicite, et même pas toujours conscient. C’est moins par les mots que par nos comportements, l’urgence d’agir et les émotions partagées qu’on constatait qu’on se sentait tous un peu dans le même bateau.

Déjà, au début de l’automne 2013, mes tripes me criaient que ce « débat » allait mal finir. Comme fille de la banlieue de Québec, je connaissais trop bien comment les discours médiatiques affectent rapidement notre quotidien. Enfant, j’avais pu sentir les regards se tourner vers moi les matins où, quand j’entrais dans l’autobus, André Arthur vociférait contre les Noirs ou les immigrants dans la radio du chauffeur. Ados, mon frère et moi avions été agressés verbalement par des clients à quelques reprises dans nos emplois d’étudiants, alors que politiciens, animateurs de radio et autres chroniqueurs pompaient quasi quotidiennement les gens contre les « minorités qui exagèrent » en plein coeur de la « crise des accommodements raisonnables ».

La plupart ne voyaient la « Charte des valeurs » que pour ce qu’elle était explicitement, c’est-à-dire un projet de loi proposant des idées précises pouvant être adoptées ou non au terme d’un débat. Quand on comprend, ou qu’on a subi directement le pouvoir des mots dans une société, on voit d’abord la « Charte » comme un désinhibiteur de parole, qui prend par ailleurs la forme d’un projet de loi.

Le texte de la « Charte » n’est jamais devenu loi, mais un certain type de discours sur les minorités s’est répandu comme une traînée de poudre dans l’espace public québécois à partir de 2013. Il y a dix ans, les plus sensibles pouvaient déjà comprendre que le moment allait transformer, au moins pour une génération, ce qui était dicible et audible en politique québécoise.

Ce que j’écris sera difficile à recevoir pour plusieurs lecteurs. Je vois venir d’ici les « avec des gens comme elle, on ne pourrait plus débattre, on ne pourrait plus rien dire ! ». Bien sûr, là n’est pas mon propos. Ce genre de réactions est le plus souvent nourri par une insistance sur les intentions — des gens qui proposent certaines idées politiques ou tiennent certains discours dans l’espace public — et un refus de se pencher sérieusement aussi sur les conséquences des mots, leurs effets, leur pouvoir.

Il me semble que si on veut être en mesure de faire un exercice de réflexion honnête sur un événement politique aussi marquant que le fameux débat sur la « Charte », on ne peut pas faire semblant que la circulation des idées dans l’espace public n’a pas aussi un effet direct sur le sentiment de sécurité, au quotidien, des Québécois dont on décide de « débattre ».

Le hasard fait que l’homme qui avait déposé le projet de « Charte des valeurs » en 2013 est aujourd’hui toujours ministre, et que cette fois, il est en train de trouver comment réagir à ceux qui voudraient qu’on fasse des enfants trans et non binaires un objet de débat national.

M. Drainville, et tous les acteurs de la classe politique et médiatique concernés, laissons de côté nos différends une minute. Je vous invite à imaginer ces enfants et ces ados, déjà vulnérables pour un ensemble de raisons, entrer dans l’autobus au moment où l’on « débat » du pour et du contre de leur existence et de leurs droits à la radio, et à voir les regards se tourner vers eux. Je vous intime de bien vouloir vous mettre dans leur peau. Tentez de votre mieux de comprendre l’impact de chacun de vos mots sur leurs interactions sociales quotidiennes. Interrogez-vous sur la place qu’ils auront la certitude d’avoir, ou non, dans la société québécoise. Dites maintenant ce que vous avez à dire comme si ces jeunes étaient directement en face de vous. Parce que, croyez-moi, ils vous écoutent.

Anthropologue, Emilie Nicolas est chroniqueuse au Devoir et à Libération. Elle anime le balado Détours pour Canadaland.

Source: Quand on «débat» de toi

Filed under gender, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Palestinian politicians lash out at renowned academics who denounced president’s antisemitic remarks

2023/09/15 Leave a comment

Sigh:

Palestinian politicians on Wednesday raged against dozens of Palestinian academics who had criticized President Mahmoud Abbas’ recent remarks on the Holocaust that drew widespread accusations of antisemitism.

They lambasted the open letter signed earlier this week by over a hundred Palestinian academics, activists and artists based around the world as “the statement of shame.”

The well-respected writers and thinkers had released the letter after footage surfaced that showed Abbas asserting European Jews were persecuted by Hitler because of what he described as their “social functions” and predatory lending practices, rather than their religion or ethnicity.

“Their statement is consistent with the Zionist narrative and its signatories give credence to the enemies of the Palestinian people,” said the secular nationalist Fatah party that runs the Palestinian Authority.

Fatah officials called the signatories “mouthpieces for the occupation” and “extremely dangerous.”

In the open letter, the legions of Palestinian academics, most of whom live in the United States and Europe, condemned Abbas’ comments as “morally and politically reprehensible.”

“We adamantly reject any attempt to diminish, misrepresent, or justify antisemitism, Nazi crimes against humanity or historical revisionism vis-à-vis the Holocaust,” the letter added. A few of the signatories are based in east Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.

In Geneva on Wednesday, Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, blasted Abbas’ comments as “overtly antisemitic” and distorting of the Holocaust. She said the open letter from the Palestinian academics was “stronger almost than what I had to say.”

“There’s no question about it: These kind of statements must stop, because they do nothing to advance peace, and worse than that, they spread anti-Semitism,” Lipstadt told The Associated Press outside an event on antisemitism attended by dozens of diplomats on the sidelines of a session of the Human Rights Council.

The chorus of indignation among Palestinian leaders over the letter casts light on a controversy that for decades has plagued the Palestinian relationship with the Holocaust. The Nazi genocide, which killed nearly 6 million Jews and millions of others, sent European Jews pouring into the Holy Land.

Israel was established in 1948 as a safe haven for Jews in the wake of the Holocaust, and remembering the Holocaust and honoring its victims remains a powerful part of the country’s national identity.

But the war surrounding Israel’s establishment displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, who fled or were forced from their homes in what the Palestinians call the “nakba,” or catastrophe. Many Palestinians are loathe to focus on the atrocities of the Holocaust for fear of undercutting their own national cause.

“It doesn’t serve our political interest to keep bringing up the Holocaust,” said Mkhaimer Abusaada, a political scientist at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City. “We are suffering from occupation and settlement expansion and fascist Israeli polices. That is what we should be stressing.”

But frequent Holocaust distortion and denial among Palestinians has only drawn further scrutiny to the tensions surrounding their relationship to the Holocaust. That unease may have started with Al-Husseini, the World War II-era grand mufti of Jerusalem and a Palestinian Arab nationalist. He was an enthusiastic Nazi supporter who helped recruit Bosnian Muslims to their side, and whose antisemitism was well-documented.

More recently, Abbas has repeatedly incited various international uproars with speeches denounced as antisemitic Holocaust denial. In 2018, he repeated a claim about usury and Ashkenazi Jews similar to the one he made in his speech to Fatah members last month. Last year, he accused Israel of committing “50 Holocausts” against Palestinians.

For Israel, Abbas’ record has fueled accusations that he is not to be trusted as a partner in peace negotiations to end the decadeslong conflict. Through decades of failed peace talks, Abbas has led the Palestinian Authority, the semiautonomous body that began administering parts of the occupied West Bank after the Oslo peace process of the 1990s.

Abbas has kept a tight grip on power for the last 17 years and his security forces have been accused of harshly cracking down on dissent. His authority has become deeply unpopular over its reviled security alliance with Israel and its failure to hold democratic elections.

The open letter signed by Palestinian academics this week also touched on what it described as the authority’s “increasingly authoritarian and draconian rule” and said Abbas had “forfeited any claim to represent the Palestinian people.”

Source: Palestinian politicians lash out at renowned academics who denounced president’s antisemitic remarks – Yahoo! Voices

Filed under Antisemitism, Holocaust Tagged with , , ,

Breguet: It’s time to reduce immigration

2023/09/14 Leave a comment

But will they? Despite all the signals on possible changes, any pivot may be too hard a political reversal for the government and its NDP partner to make.

But Breguet makes a convincing case, as it is the only short-term measure that can show seriousness on housing and other related files.

And I continue to believe that given these issues affect immigrants and non-immigrants alike, this may be less of a third rail then appears:

How could the Trudeau government interject new political life into itself? It could switch its position on immigration. I’m not talking about going PPC or [Quebec Premier Francois] Legault, but a significant pivot from ongoing increase to the country’s immigration in-take target and its general “century initiative” rhetoric.

This isn’t such a far-fetched idea. We’ve seen recent glimpses when government raised the prospect of a possible cap on the number of international students, a group that has ballooned massively in recent years to reach 900k recently, and is believed, at least by some, to put significant pressure on rents and housing prices. 

While the Liberals have, at times, given the impression that they don’t take the housing crisis seriously and are inclined to double down on satisfying their increasingly mortgage-free boomer base, we must also recognize that the Liberal Party of Canada has historically been remarkably good at adapting and pivoting when needed. They read the room much better than the Conservatives and New Democrats. 

So, if they decide to get more serious on the housing file, they’ll need to confront the fact they can’t build enough (or, more precisely, incentivize provinces and cities to build) to make a meaningful difference on prices before 2025. They could however pivot on immigration and have results quickly. 

It might start with reducing the number of international students. But the government’s track record on immigration and built-in strengths could enable it to go further by reducing the number of permanent residents (including points-based immigrants and refugees) without the risk of people questioning its commitment to immigration and diversity. 

It’s hard to know how much such a policy pivot would affect housing demand and in turn prices but it may not matter per se. Politics, of course, is ultimately about optics. The government would look like it’s trying to get to the root of the housing crisis. The Conservatives, by contrast, appear afraid of their own shadows with anything related to immigration. 

The prime minister might therefore gamble that his name and decades of good-faith support for immigration and multiculturalism would allow him to pivot without alienating voters from cultural and visible minorities—something that the Conservatives likely cannot afford, especially after the 2015 election. The Liberals in short may have the political maneuverability to counterintuitively run to the right of the Conservatives on immigration. 

Polls have shown people are ready to support a reduction in immigration levels. A well-crafted message centered on helping the housing market could succeed and take this topic away from Poilievre who currently enjoyed a de facto monopoly on it in the past couple of years. 

Bryan Breguet, Too Close to Call founder and pollster

Source: It’s time to reduce immigration

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →