Attack on Salman Rushdie prompts Canadians to highlight author’s relentless fight for free speech

2022/08/15 Leave a comment

As someone posted to Iran when the fatwa was issued, and as a fan of his writing, this attack strikes close to home along with the importance of free speech. We will see if some in Canada defend or excuse the indefensible:

Canadian writers, publishers and literary figures doubled down on the right to freedom of thought and expression on Saturday, one day after an attack in the U.S. on award-winning author Salman Rushdie that has left him on a ventilator in hospital.

Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses drew death threats from Iran’s leaders in the 1980s, was stabbed in the neck and abdomen Friday by a man who rushed the stage as the author was about to give a lecture in western New York.

Louise Dennys, executive vice-president and publisher of Penguin Random House Canada, has published and edited Rushdie’s writings for over 30 years. She condemned the attack on her longtime friend and colleague as “cowardly” and “reprehensible in every way.”

“He is without doubt one of the greatest proponents of freedom of thought and speech, and debate and discussion in the world today,” Dennys said in a telephone interview. “I have hopes of his recovery. He’s a great warrior and fighter, and I hope he is fighting back.”

Rushdie, 75, a native of India who has lived in Britain and the U.S., is known for his surreal and satirical prose style

The Satanic Verses drew death threats after it was published in 1988, with many Muslims regarding as blasphemy a dream sequence based on the life of the Prophet Muhammad, among other objections. Rushdie’s book had already been banned and burned in India, Pakistan and elsewhere before Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a 1989 fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death.

A 24-year-old man is in custody, facing charges in Friday’s attack. The accused was born a decade after the publication of The Satanic Verses. Police said the motive was unclear. Investigators were working to determine whether anyone else could be linked to the incident.

After the publication of The Satanic Verses, often-violent protests erupted across the Muslim world against Rushdie. At least 45 people were killed in riots over the book, including 12 people in Rushdie’s hometown of Mumbai. In 1991, a Japanese translator of the book was stabbed to death and an Italian translator survived a knife attack. In 1993, the book’s Norwegian publisher was shot three times and survived.

The death threats prompted Rushdie to go into hiding under a British government protection program, though he cautiously resumed public appearances after nine years of seclusion, maintaining his outspoken criticism of religious extremism overall.

‘He couldn’t be silenced by fear’

“We all depend on the storytelling, power and imagination of writers,” Dennys said. Rushdie “came out of hiding because he realized he wanted to play a role in the world we live in, defending those rights, she said.

“He couldn’t be silenced by fear, and I think that point is something he will continue to make if, as we all hope, he survives.”

Dennys said the attack is already having the opposite effect of its suspected intentions given the outpouring of support from the international literary community, as well as activists and government officials, who cited Rushdie’s courage for his longtime free speech advocacy despite risks to his own safety.

“It’s brought everyone together to realize how precious and fragile our freedoms are and how important it is to speak up for them,” Dennys said.

The president of PEN Canada, an organization that defends authors’ freedom of expression, condemned the “savage attack” on their “friend and colleague,” Rushdie, who is a member.

Canadian writer John Ralston Saul, who has known Rushdie since the 1990s, said the author was always aware that someone might attack him, but he chose to live publicly in order to speak out against those trying to silence free expression and debate.

“[Rushdie’s] work and whole life are a reminder of what the life of the public writer is in reality,” he said. “This would be the worst possible time to give in or show any sense that we must be more careful with our words. We’re not really writers if we give in to that kind of threat.”

The accused, Hadi Matar, was arrested after the attack at the Chautauqua Institution, a non-profit education and retreat centre. Matar’s lawyer entered a not guilty plea in a New York court on Saturday to charges of attempted murder and assault.

After the attack, some longtime visitors to the centre questioned why there wasn’t tighter security for the event, given the threats against Rushdie and a bounty on his head offering more than $3 million to anyone who killed him.

Saul, who spoke at the Chautauqua Institution years before Rushdie’s attack, said it has an “open tradition” of debate, free expression and anti-violence going back over 100 years.

“It’s one of the freest places to take advantage of our belief in freedom,” he said.

Witnesses to the attack on Salman Rushdie Friday in western New York recount how a man approached the stage at the Chautauqua Institution where the author was about to give a lecture, attacked him and was later pinned down by people from the audience.

Roland Gulliver, director of the Toronto International Festival of Authors, tweeted Saturday that literary festivals and book events are “spaces of expression, to tell your stories in friendship, safety and respect.”

“To see this so violently broken is incredibly shocking,” he wrote.

Expressions of sympathy came from the political realm as well, with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau condemning the attack as a “cowardly … strike against freedom of expression.”

“No one should be threatened or harmed on the basis of what they have written,” read a statement posted to Trudeau’s official Twitter account. “I’m wishing him a speedy recovery.”

Rushdie suffered a damaged liver and severed nerves in his arm, and is likely to lose an eye as a result of the attack, the author’s agent, Andrew Wylie, said Friday evening.

A physician who witnessed the attack and was among those who rushed to help described Rushdie’s wounds as “serious but recoverable.”

Source: Attack on Salman Rushdie prompts Canadians to highlight author’s relentless fight for free speech

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with ,

New research shows Bill 21 having ‘devastating’ impact on religious minorities in Quebec [particularly Muslim women]

2022/08/11 Leave a comment

Would be interesting to see the breakdown between Montreal and the rest of Quebec, where immigration is low as is the number of visible and religious minorities:

New research shows that three years after Quebec’s secularism law — commonly known as Bill 21 — was adopted, religious minorities in the province are feeling increasingly alienated and hopeless.  

“Religious minority communities are encountering — at levels that are disturbing — a reflection of disdain, hate, mistrust and aggression,” Miriam Taylor, lead researcher and the director of publications and partnerships at the Association for Canadian Studies, told CBC in an interview.

“We even saw threats and physical violence,” Taylor said.

Bill 21, which passed in 2019, bars public school teachers, police officers, judges and government lawyers, among other civil servants in positions of authority, from wearing religious symbols — such as hijabs, crucifixes or turbans — while at work.

Taylor and her colleagues at the association worked with polling firm Leger to gather a unique portrait of attitudes toward Bill 21 in Quebec.

The association surveyed members of certain religious minority communities including 632 Muslims, 165 Jews and 56 Sikhs.

Those results were folded into a Leger survey of the Quebec population as whole, and then weighted to ensure the sample was representative of the entire population.

That allowed Taylor to compare and contrast the attitudes toward Bill 21 of Quebecers who are religious minorities with the attitudes of Quebecers as a whole.

In total 1,828 people were questioned in the online survey.

Taylor shared an advance copy of her final report, which is being released today, with CBC.

Muslim women most affected

Although all three religious minority groups surveyed said they’ve experienced negative impacts due to Bill 21, the effects are being most acutely felt by Muslims and, in particular, Muslim women.

“We saw severe social stigmatisation of Muslim women, marginalization of Muslim women and very disturbing declines in their sense of well-being, their ability to fulfil their aspirations, sense of safety, but also hope for the future,”  Taylor said.

Of the Muslim women surveyed, 78 per cent said their feeling of being accepted as a full-fledged member of Quebec society had worsened over the last three years.

Fifty-three per cent said they’d heard prejudicial remarks about Muslims from family, friends or colleagues.

People surveyed were given the opportunity to share examples of comments they’d heard or behaviours they’d experienced.

One reported hearing: ”These Muslim women with rags on their heads, if they are not able to integrate, let them return to their country.”

Forty-seven per cent of Muslim women said they’d been treated unfairly by a person in a position of authority. 

One person reported being called a “dirty immigrant” by a police officer in Quebec City.  Another reported that a teacher told disparaging anecdotes about Islam in class.

Two thirds of Muslim women said they’d been a victim of and/or a witness to a hate crime. Seventy-three per cent said their feeling of being safe in public had worsened.

Taylor found that nearly three quarters of Muslim women surveyed felt their comfort about safety in public had worsened in the three years since Bill 21 was adopted. (Association for Canadian Studies)

People surveyed offered examples ranging from racist remarks to death threats, having hijabs ripped off and being spat on. One person reported that a man deliberately tried to run over them and their three-year-old daughter with a pickup truck.

A majority of Muslims also reported feeling less hopeful, less free to express themselves in public and less likely to participate in social and political life.

“For a law that’s supposed to be very moderate and only touch a very small number of people, we were shocked at the responses,” Taylor said.

She said the response she found most upsetting was that 83 per cent of Muslim women surveyed said their confidence in their children’s future had worsened since Bill 21 passed.

Taylor said the figure that most upset her was the lack of hope Quebec Muslims have for their children’s future. (Association for Canadian Studies)

“It’s one thing to say: ‘you know what, I’m experiencing a lot of unfair treatment because I’m not understood,'” Taylor said. “It’s another thing to project forward and have no hope for your children.”

Law reinforces existing prejudices

Taylor believes Bill 21 alone isn’t responsible for the feelings of alienation and insecurity Quebec Muslims and other religious minorities feel.

She said prejudicial attitudes have been gestating in Quebec for nearly 20 years, when the debate over so-called “reasonable accommodations” for religious minorities first took hold.

“Malaise, fear and anxieties get provoked over time,” Taylor said.

She said often those anxieties are based on ignorance.

“By their own admission, Quebecers in general have very little contact with members of religious minorities,” Taylor said. “All of these negative opinions are based on lack of knowledge.”

Taylor said Bill 21 has enabled those prejudices — rooted in ignorance — to become the norm.

“We end up with a situation where the malaise of the observer trumps the deep convictions of the person actually wearing the religious symbols,” Taylor said.

“We’re validating and reinforcing those opinions, and then we’re politicizing the symbols. Those symbols are lightning rods,” she said.

“And so we end up dehumanizing the people wearing the symbols,” Taylor said.

Women generally less supportive of Bill 21

Taylor said that Bill 21 has consistently maintained the support of about two thirds of Quebecers since it was adopted, with a dip last January after the high-profile case of a hijab-wearing teacher in Chelsea who was removed from the classroom and reassigned.

But she said that support is nuanced and full of contradictions.

Women in Quebec, for example, are generally less supportive of Bill 21 than men. Sixty-eight per cent of men support the law compared to 58 per cent of women.

Taylor said the research showed that women, and in particular young women, are less supportive of Bill 21 than men. (Association for Canadian Studies)

And the younger women are, the less likely they are to support the law.  Just 31 per cent of women aged 18-24 support Bill 21.

Taylor said that raised questions for her.

“It’s touted as a feminist law by the people who support it. So why is it that particularly the younger women of Quebec are so much less in favour of it when one would expect the reverse proportion?” she said.

Support for the law but not for enforcement

Another statistic that surprised Taylor: even Quebecers who support the law don’t necessarily want to see it enforced.

Only 40 per cent of people surveyed believe a public servant who does not comply with the law should lose their job. 

“The law is supported and liked by Quebecers. But they seem much less keen to see it actually applied,” Taylor said.

“I think that we’re a human society and we care about people. We all need income to survive and I think people are aware of what a heavy price that would be to pay,” she said.

Quebecers care about what courts say about Bill 21

Taylor was also surprised that the survey showed that Quebecers care deeply about what courts have to say about Bill 21.

When drafting the law, the Quebec government, recognizing that it would likely violate both the Canadian and the Quebec charters of rights, pre-emptively invoked the constitutional notwithstanding clause, and altered the Quebec charter to try to shut down court challenges.

But those challenges came anyway, and now both the government and groups that oppose the bill are challenging a 2021 Quebec Superior Court ruling that upheld most of the law before the Quebec Court of Appeal.

It’s widely expected the law will eventually be challenged in the Supreme Court of Canada.

The bill’s architect, Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette, has argued that it’s up to elected politicians in the National Assembly — and not the courts — to decide how they want to organize relations between the state and religion.

But Quebecers seem to feel differently.

Sixty-four per cent, roughly the same percentage that support the bill, also feel it’s important for the Supreme Court to issue an opinion on whether Bill 21 is discriminatory.

And if the courts were to confirm the law is discriminatory, support for the bill would plummet.

Only 46 per cent of people surveyed — less than half — said they would continue to support the law if the courts confirmed it violates the Charter of Rights.

Debate not over

Jolin-Barrette has portrayed Quebecers as united in support of the bill, and has accused detractors of trying to divide Quebecers.

But Taylor’s survey shows that a majority of Quebecers — 56 per cent — believe the law itself is divisive.

When Bill 21 was adopted, Jolin-Barrette said it would “permit a harmonious transition toward secularism” for Quebec.

Taylor said that clearly hasn’t been the case.

“The debate is very far from closed,” she said. “Bill 21 is having devastating impacts on citizens in our province. It’s tearing apart our social fabric and I think it’s undermining our democracy.”

“If national unity is achieved at the expense of labelling minorities as in some way harmful or a threat, these are signs of the degeneration of democracy,” she said. 

Taylor said as a Quebecer, she finds this distressing.

“We live in a very distinct province. We’re different. It’s an experiment that on some level should never have succeeded: a thriving French society on an English continent,” she said.

“In all my years, I associate that distinct nature with a humanity, with understanding how important identity is,” Taylor said.

She said Bill 21 threatens that.

“I feel like we’re doing major harm to those values that we hold dear and that make us special,” Taylor said.

Source: New research shows Bill 21 having ‘devastating’ impact on religious minorities in Quebec

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , , ,

ICYMI – Khan: Every community has a responsibility to address intimate partner violence

2022/07/25 Leave a comment

Good column and reminnder:

Forty years ago, NDP MP Margaret Mitchell rose in Parliament to address the issue of domestic violence during question period, based on her experience hearing from battered women as a member of the Standing Committee on Health, Welfare and Social Affairs. But her opening remarks, in which she recounted that one in 10 husbands regularly beat their wives, were met with derisive laughter and heckling from a number of fellow MPs. “I don’t think this is very much of a laughing matter,” she was forced to respond.

Around the same time, in the early 1980s, budding journalist Anna Maria Tremonti was experiencing the very trauma recounted in the committee hearings. Like so many women, she carefully hid all signs of intimate partner violence (IPV) from the outside world, and she went on to become a high-profile reporter, hosting The Current on CBC for many years. However, the emotional scars never really healed. Now – in a tremendous act of public service – she has courageously shared details of the pain and shame that she has carried privately for decades, in the podcast Welcome to Paradise.

Canada has come a long way in recognizing the issue of IPV, but it remains damaging on many levels. According to the Canadian Women’s Foundation, a woman in Canada is killed by her intimate partner every six days, and children who witness violence in the home have twice the rate of psychiatric disorders as children from non-violent homes. Domestic violence also threatens a woman’s path to economic independence: roughly 40 per cent of victims found it difficult to return to work, while about 8.5 per cent said that they lost their jobs because of it.

As Nova Scotia’s inquiry into the worst mass shooting in modern Canadian history examines the role of intimate partner violence, a recent U.S. studyfound that more than two-thirds of mass shootings from 2014 to 2019 stemmed from violence toward partners or family members, or are perpetrated by shooters with a history of domestic violence toward their intimates.

While Canada may not have the prevalence of mass shootings as the United States, we are certainly not immune to the type of incidents described in that study. In 2015, Carol Culleton, Anastasia Kuzyk and Nathalie Warmerdam were murdered by a mutual ex-partner in Ontario. After hearing testimony into the triple femicide last month, an inquest jury made 86 recommendations in response to the murders, including a recognition of femicide as a distinct crime and manner of death. It also called on Ontario to declare intimate partner violence an epidemic.

Indeed, researchers have described the potential rise of IPV incidents during the COVID-19 pandemic as a “shadow pandemic”. Lockdowns increased the risk factors for IPV, owing to enhanced financial stressors, lack of space for women to leave the home, isolation from support systems and lack of privacy to call for help.

IPV occurs across faiths, cultures, and income groups. However, immigrant women may be more vulnerable to domestic violence owing to economic dependence on male partners, language barriers and a lack of knowledge about resources.

Within Muslim communities, there are a number of issues that exacerbate the potential for domestic violence. In some circles, there is tacit religious approval of beating one’s wife as a means of control and discipline. I still remember wandering into a bookshop on Toronto’s Gerrard Street while shopping for a wedding dress some 25 years ago, and reading a tract by an imam who counselled men to beat their wife on the wedding night. There needs to be unequivocal, repeated condemnation of all forms of domestic violence by imams when addressing their congregants.

Another issue is the concept of “sitr,” or concealment. Muslims are advised not to publicize the faults and mistakes of others. However, when the fault results in harm to another individual, there is a duty to report such behaviour to stop the harm. Unfortunately, some take “sitr” to an extreme, deeming spousal abuse as a “private matter,” without any consideration given to the harm inflicted. The limits of “sitr,” seen through the lens of harm prevention, need to be reconsidered.

In recent years, however, denial has given way to acknowledgement and efforts to remedy the problem. Sakeenah Homes, founded in 2018, has provided culturally appropriate services to women, children and families facing homelessness, violence and poverty. And since 2015, Nisa Homes has opened nine shelters across Canada, providing refuge and care to more than 1,000 women and children. These spaces can empower and give hope to the vulnerable, allowing the broken to be rebuilt.

The scourge of IPV will not disappear anytime soon. We must address it with resolve to protect the most vulnerable – and never lose sight of the inherent dignity, resilience and strength of each and every woman forced to traverse this most difficult path.

Source: Every community has a responsibility to address intimate partner violence

Filed under Honour Killings, Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with ,

StatsCan Study: The religiosity of Canadians and the COVID-19 pandemic

2022/07/19 Leave a comment

Of interest, both the overall trend and the differences between different religious groups. Can’t wait for the October release and opportunities for deeper analysis:

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on many aspects of Canadian life, including religion. In particular, the risks associated with the virus, as well as physical distancing measures, have limited access to places of worship. Many religious organizations have offered the option to attend religious services online. Although the pandemic has made group worship difficult, some surveys conducted by private firms have suggested that it has led to an increase in prayer or a strengthening of faith.

Using data from several cycles of the General Social Survey, a new study released today examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the religiosity of Canadians. Specifically, it analyzes changes in rates of religious affiliation, frequency of participation in religious activities on a group or individual basis, and involvement with religious organizations from 2015 to 2020.

The study found a decrease in group religious participation from 2019 (pre-pandemic) to 2020 (start of the pandemic). In the general population, the percentage of people who participated in a religious group activity in the previous year fell from 47% in 2019 to 40% in 2020.

The study also found that the impact of the pandemic on participation in religious group activities was greater for some religious groups. For example, the proportion of people who had participated in a religious group activity in the previous year fell more sharply than average among Buddhists (from 74% in 2019 to 50% in 2020) and Muslims (from 71% to 57%). This proportion fell from 60% to 53% among Christian-affiliated groups, from 75% to 67% among Jewish people, and from 78% to 70% among Hindus.

Finally, the data revealed that, overall, the pandemic had no measurable effect on the frequency of individual religious or spiritual activities (e.g., prayer, meditation, etc.). Similarly, it did not appear to have affected self-reported religious affiliation.

On October 26, new data from the 2021 Census will provide a more detailed picture of the diversity of religious affiliation groups in Canada and of the people that form them.

Source: Study: The religiosity of Canadians and the COVID-19 pandemic

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

Leduc and Turp: Quel conflit entre la laïcité et le patrimoine religieux ?

2022/07/13 Leave a comment

Somewhat ironic to argue that laïcité allows for financial support to religious heritage but not to the rights of those with religious symbols. That being said, understand the rationale for financial support or tax breaks for heritage properties, religious or not:

Dans un article publié le 6 juillet 2022 sous le titre « Le congé de taxes des lieux de culte remis en question », Le Devoir nous apprenait que la Commission des finances de la Ville de Montréal suggère « que, dans le contexte de la laïcité de l’État, la Ville demande au gouvernement du Québec une compensation pour les taxes qu’elle ne peut percevoir des communautés religieuses », notamment pour les lieux de culte. Elle a tort. Les problèmes de fiscalité municipale ne peuvent se régler aux dépens de la préservation du patrimoine religieux et de ce qu’il représente pour la société.

Ce faisant, la Commission souscrit aux arguments de ceux qui croient que l’État devrait s’abstenir de financer la sauvegarde du patrimoine religieux ou de lui accorder quelque traitement fiscal favorable, et ce, en vertu du principe de la séparation de l’État et des religions.

Certains se demandent en effet, puisque la plupart des organismes de bienfaisance enregistrés à caractère religieux consacreraient, dit-on, toutes leurs ressources ou presque à des activités liées à la foi et au culte, où se trouve le « bénéfice public tangible ». Un éditorial paru dans ce journal le 8 juin 2019, intitulé « Fiscalité et religion : la neutralité s’impose » posait d’ailleurs la question.

Sans ces avantages fiscaux, il faut savoir que les autorités religieuses ne pourraient tout simplement plus subvenir à l’entretien du patrimoine religieux dont elles ont toujours la charge, ce qui devrait suffire à constater un premier « bénéfice public tangible ».

De plus, il est tout de même ironique de constater que de telles objections sont soulevées à ce moment-ci, lorsque l’on sait que les organismes de défense du patrimoine proposent d’étendre de tels avantages fiscaux aux propriétaires laïques de biens patrimoniaux, qui constituent toujours une charge particulière à ceux qui doivent en assurer la préservation.

Enfin, non seulement ces objecteurs de conscience font preuve d’insensibilité au fait religieux et aux besoins spirituels de plusieurs de leurs concitoyens, mais ils ne font pas de cas de la nécessité de préserver cet héritage pour la société dans son ensemble, sachant que le meilleur moyen d’y parvenir est d’assurer la vocation religieuse et cultuelle de ce patrimoine, dont les retombées dépassent largement le seul cercle des fidèles.

Une question de cohérence

Au-delà de tous ces arguments, cependant, l’on oublie que la laïcité repose aussi sur le principe de la liberté de conscience et de religion, que l’État doit favoriser, non seulement en vertu de la Loi sur la laïcité de l’État et de la Charte des droits et libertés de la personne, mais aussi de la Loi sur la liberté des cultes, et de l’obligation du Québec de se conformer au Pacte international relatif aux droits civils et politiques.

Il faut aussi ajouter qu’aux termes de la Convention européenne des droits de l’homme, la Cour européenne a consacré la liberté des États de contribuer au financement des cultes, autorisant une différence de traitement des cultes pour des motifs objectifs, historiques et raisonnables dans une société donnée, permettant l’attribution d’un impôt ecclésial résultant d’un concordat entre l’État et une confession religieuse, reconnaissant le principe de l’autonomie ecclésiale, affirmant que le financement du culte est par ailleurs le gage de l’exercice collectif de la liberté de religion, le droit européen se montrant flexible en appliquant un principe de subsidiarité, ce qui donne lieu à des solutions diverses en la matière d’un État à l’autre.

Tout cela devrait relancer la question de la nationalisation du patrimoine religieux du Québec. Si notre Loi sur la laïcité de l’État s’inspire du modèle français, il nous faudrait être cohérent, car ce modèle, depuis la Loi du 9 décembre 1905 concernant la séparation des Églises et de l’État, a confié la responsabilité des cathédrales à l’État et celle des églises paroissiales aux communes, conférant ainsi aux autorités civiles la responsabilité du patrimoine religieux français, la France nous devançant en effet tant en ce qui a trait à la gestion de son patrimoine religieux qu’en matière de laïcité, ayant démontré que ces deux notions n’étaient pas incompatibles.

Ce n’est donc pas vers moins de responsabilité à l’égard du patrimoine religieux que devraient tendre les municipalités, mais plutôt à en faire davantage, comme la Loi sur le patrimoine culturel les y invite depuis les dernières modifications à cette loi entrées en vigueur en 2021.

Au demeurant, la Loi sur la laïcité de l’État ne contient aucune interdiction au financement des cultes ni d’exception en ce qui a trait au financement et au traitement fiscal du patrimoine religieux.

La proposition de la Commission des finances de la Ville de Montréal, si elle était adoptée par la Ville de Montréal et le gouvernement du Québec, constituerait une violation flagrante des droits fondamentaux entourant l’exercice collectif de la liberté de religion et de leurs propres obligations à cet égard. Elle est irrecevable. En cela, nous saluons la dissidence à cette proposition d’Alan De Sousa et de Laurent Desbois, respectivement maires des arrondissements de Saint-Laurent et d’Outremont. Ainsi que l’écrivait l’honorable Clément Gascon dans l’arrêt Mouvement laïque québécois c. Saguenay (Ville) de la Cour suprême du Canada, « […] le devoir de neutralité de l’État ne l’oblige pas à s’interdire de célébrer et de préserver son patrimoine religieux ».

Source: Quel conflit entre la laïcité et le patrimoine religieux ?

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , ,

Historian Irving Abella said the struggle for Jewish equality changed Canada for the better

2022/07/08 Leave a comment

Worth reading:

The Canada of the first half of the last century, and particularly from the 1920s through the 1940s, was a foreboding place for Jews, as it was for most immigrants. Closed to most of the world by racist immigration laws that divided the peoples of the world into preferred and (mostly) non-preferred, Canada was a country permeated with xenophobia, nativism and antisemitism. The Jew was the pariah of Canadian society, demeaned, denounced and discriminated against.

For Canadian Jews in these years, quotas and restrictions were a way of life. According to a 1938 study by the Canadian Jewish Congress, few of the country’s teachers and none of its school principals were Jewish. The banks, insurance companies and the large industrial and commercial interests, it charged, also excluded Jews from employment. Department stores did not hire Jews as salespeople. Jewish doctors could not get hospital appointments, and when one Jewish doctor, Sam Rabinovitch, was hired as an intern at the Montreal hospital, the other interns went out on strike, along with other doctors, closing the hospital for a week until Rabinovitch was fired.

If the Jew experienced difficulty finding a job or getting an education, finding a place to live or to vacation was even harder. Increasingly, restrictive covenants were placed on various properties prohibiting their sale to Jews, and at beaches and resorts throughout the nation, signs were springing up that banned Jews. So-called swastika clubs of young hoodlums were formed to intimidate Jews and keep them away from “restricted” beaches. The threat of violence was so great that Jewish leaders took the unusual step of warning the community “not to hold large gatherings in any portion of the city where such a gathering is liable to arouse the animosity of certain classes of the non-Jewish population.”

Why was Canada so antisemitic? There are various reasons. To some extent the massive antisemitic propaganda of the Nazis had its impact. Some were taken in by it and by such American hate-mongers as Henry Ford, Father Charles Coughlin, Gerald L. K. Smith and dozens of others. It was also a time of depression and the search for scapegoats invariably ended at a Jewish doorstep. Jews were also publicly seen and denounced as troublemakers. The prominence of Jewish names in the left-wing movement seduced many gullible or malevolent Canadians into believing that most Jews were communists. Obviously, many others hated Jews for religious reasons. Much of the antisemitism in Quebec and in fundamentalist areas of Western Canada originated from religious teachings. Jews had killed Christ, had refused to repent or convert to Christianity and, therefore, were damned.

What is most astonishing about this antisemitism is how few and powerless were Canadian Jews at this time. They made up just more than 1 per cent of the population and had no political or economic clout. Clearly they could be seen as a threat only by the paranoid. Equally surprising was the silence of the churches in the face of this frightful and oppressive anti-Jewish feeling.

With the onset of war, if Canadian attitudes toward Jews changed at all, it was for the worse. Fully half of the Canadian people, according to a Gallup poll in 1943, indicated that they wanted no more Jews in the country. At about the same time, Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis was campaigning through the province waving a copy of a document, which he charged showed that the federal government had made a deal with the International Zionist Brotherhood, a fictitious group, to settle 100,000 Jews in Quebec in return for campaign funds for Liberal candidates. Duplessis was decisively elected.

Even the end of the war brought no respite for Canadian Jews. Discovery of the Nazi barbarities against the Jews, and the graphic horrors of the Holocaust detailed by newspapers, magazines and newsreels in theatres across Canada did not lessen antisemitic feelings. Rather, it seemed to exacerbate them.

Nevertheless, it is clear that by 1948, attitudes in Canada were beginning to change. With most of the world’s economies still devastated, Canada was on the brink of becoming a genuine world power. All she needed was more people. Thus Canada’s immigration doors were flung open, and over the next decade, more than 1.5 million newcomers poured through, including thousands of Jews, most of them survivors of death camps.

By this time, the pervasive antisemitism of earlier years had receded. Obviously, the horrors of the Holocaust shocked many Canadians; others were caught up in the dramatic struggle of the Jews in Palestine to create their own state. Though official Canadian policy was to support the British attempts to forcibly blockade Jewish refugees from entering Palestine, it seemed that a large number of Canadians sympathized with the plucky struggle of the beleaguered Jews in the Holy Land.

It was at this propitious moment that Canadian Jewish leaders chose to launch an all-out offensive against discriminatory practices in Canada. This was not the first time such an attempt had been made. In the late 1930s, the Canadian Jewish Congress had set up a committee called the Joint Public Relations Committee (JPRC) with the co-operation of another Jewish communal organization, the B’nai B’rith, to deal with discrimination against Jews in employment. These early campaigns struggled, but in the late 1940s, similar efforts finally started to see some success.

As Jewish soldiers were returning from overseas, they found the same old restrictions barring their way. In a much-publicized incident, a veteran was fired from his salesman’s job in a Toronto hardware store when it was discovered he was Jewish. “I would lose customers,” the storekeeper explained. Others found that skating rinks, swimming pools, golf clubs and hotels refused them admission despite their heroic efforts on behalf of their country.

Outraged that this kind of behaviour was perfectly legal, the Canadian Jewish Congress organized a protest march of various ethnic and religious groups from City Hall to the Icelandia Skating Rink, which had refused to remove its signs restricting admission to gentiles. As a result of the march, the coverage of it by the Toronto Star, and a meeting with Congress officials, the Toronto Police Board ruled that licences of public places were subject to cancellation if the licence holder discriminated against any minority. This was the first of many victories for the Jewish Public Relations Committee (as it was called by then) and for its new partner, the aggressive Jewish Labour Committee. Its 50,000 feisty members would provide the backbone to the Congress’s political lobbying.

Members of both the JPRC and the Jewish Labour Committee were unrelenting in their lobbying. They arranged for delegations to meet Ontario premier Leslie Frost and his cabinet colleagues; they spoke at hundreds of meetings across the country, they planted articles in the press, they met editorial boards; they distributed pamphlets; they embarked on letter-writing campaigns and they arranged for talks on radio and to various service clubs of prominent speakers who supported their views. One of these, senator Wayne Morse (a Republican from Oregon), spoke so passionately and persuasively on the Trans-Canada Network of CBC Radio in favour of fair employment legislation that it had a real impact on one of his listeners, premier Frost.

By 1951 it was clear that the lobbying had made a real difference. Most Ontario newspapers were now in favour of anti-discrimination legislation, as were many city councils across the province. And so, it seemed, was premier Frost. He arranged a quick meeting with the Jewish and civil-liberties organizations and told them secretly that he would be enacting an anti-discrimination law in the next session of the House.

Three weeks later, in the Speech from the Throne, the government of Ontario announced its intention of introducing a fair employment practices act, which would bar discrimination in hiring because of race, creed, colour, nationality, ancestry or place of origin. It was a remarkable piece of legislation and the historians who have written about it (particularly James Walker, Ruth Frager and Carmela Patrias) have described it as one of the Jewish community’s great victories in this country.

Of course employment discrimination did not disappear in Ontario, but the act marked the beginning of an era in which discrimination was no longer acceptable. Both the JPRC and the Jewish Labour Committee saw the legislation as the “thin edge of the wedge.” Once the Ontario government had admitted that discrimination in employment was unjust and immoral, how could it be condoned in other areas such as housing?

Finally, in 1962, the government created the Ontario Human Rights Commission, many of whose powers were those recommended by the Canadian Jewish Congress five years before. The victory was now largely complete. Though obviously racism and discrimination would not disappear, there were now in place mechanisms and legislation to protect minorities. With both anti-discrimination statutes and human-rights commissions successfully established, not only in Ontario but in most provinces, the human-rights lobby could move onto other issues.

Thus, by the 1960s, Canada had turned the corner. For Jews, as well as for this country’s other minorities, that decade was a watershed. Before it existed the old Canada, parochial, nativist, exclusionary; beyond it, a new Canada was taking shape, a Canada of diversity, colour, vibrancy, a Canada of open minds rather than closed doors, a Canada in which Jews and other ethnic groups were quickly becoming part of the Canadian mainstream, and were seen as part of the solution rather than as part of the problem.

The decade began with Canada finally repealing its odious racist immigration laws and opening itself up to all the world’s nations, and it closed with a government commitment to implement an official policy of multiculturalism. And it was in the 1960s that all of the barriers, restrictions and quotas against Jews crumbled, one by one, sector by sector. At long last, after 200 years in the country, the Jewish community would be able to play out its dreams and become an integral part of the very same Canadian society that had excluded it for so long.

Of course the battle for human rights in Canada is not yet won. Racist, homophobic and xenophobic attitudes still manifest themselves too often, and much remains to be done. Yet who can deny that today’s Canada is a far better place, and that its minorities better integrated thanks in large part to the trail-blazing efforts by the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Jewish Labour Committee.

Irving Abella, a noted scholar of Jewish history, died on July 3. This is an excerpt of a speech he gave to the Canadian Historical Association when he was the group’s president in 2000.

Source: Historian Irving Abella said the struggle for Jewish equality changed Canada for the better

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‘Kaali’ poster row: Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum says it ‘deeply regrets’ offence caused to Hindus; FIR filed

2022/07/07 Leave a comment

A classic example of the intersection between multiculturalism and religion, when the more conservative and fundamentalist elements are all too quick to take offence.

I was posted to Iran during the Rushdie Satanic Verses affair, the classic and extreme example of religious intolerance of contemporary culture:

Days after the poster of the documentary film ‘Kaali’ created an uproar in India and abroad, Aga Khan Museum where the film was screened issued a statement. The museum has said that it deeply regretted the offence caused to the members of the Hindu community. The documentary helmed by NRI film-maker Leena Manimekalai was being showcased at the museum in Toronto in the ‘Under The Tent’ section.

“The museum deeply regrets that one of the 18 short videos from ‘Under The Tent’ and its accompanying social media post have inadvertently caused an offence to the members of the Hindu and other faith communities,” read the statement that was posted on the museum’s website.

The statement further said that the Toronto Metropolitan University brought together works of students of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds, each student exploring their individual sense of belonging as part of Canadian multiculturalism for the ‘Under the Tent’ project. The university’s presentation was hosted by Aga Khan Museum with a view to fostering an intercultural understanding and dialogue through arts.

FIR Against Film-maker
Meanwhile, the controversy surrounding the poster continues to rage closer to home. On Tuesday, an FIR was filed against Leena Manimekalai and others for hurting religious sentiments. The FIR was filed in Uttar Pradesh and DCP Central Lucknow, Aparna Kaushik, said that an investigation was underway.

Earlier this week, the Indian High Commission in Canada issued a statement urging the Canadian authorities to take action. The High Commission said in its statement that it has received numerous complaints from the leaders of the Hindu community in Canada.
“Our Consulate General in Toronto has conveyed these concerns to the organizers of the event. We are also informed that several Hindu groups have approached authorities in Canada to take action. We urge the Canadian authorities and the event organizers to withdraw all such provocative material,” read the release.

Filmmaker Manimekalai took to Twitter on Sunday to share a poster of her upcoming film ‘Kaali’ that depicted goddess Kali as smoking with an LGBTQ+ flag in the backdrop. The poster created an uproar on social media demanding the arrest of the NRI film-maker.

Source: ‘Kaali’ poster row: Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum says it ‘deeply regrets’ offence caused to Hindus; FIR filed

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City apologizes, seeks to rectify job loss after ‘clean-shave’ policy under fire by Sikh advocacy group

2022/07/07 Leave a comment

Reasonable accommodation in action with “under-mask beard covers”:

First came the Tuesday afternoon phone call and apology from Toronto Mayor John Tory. Now, Birkawal Singh Anand wants his job back.

Anand was one of more than 100 Sikh guards laid off from the security companies contracted to staff City-operated shelters and respite sites after the guards refused to follow a City mandate requiring they be clean-shaven in order for a tight-fitting N95 mask be worn in the event of a COVID-19 outbreak.

On Tuesday, Toronto issued a press release apologizing and saying that security guards should be rehired and paid for lost wages. “City of Toronto apologizes to the World Sikh Organization of Canada (WSO) for any delay in addressing this issue and ensuring security contractors were offering religious accommodations.”

The city said it was providing the update to “ensure security contractors accommodate all employees following a complaint from the World Sikh Organization of Canada.”

“It shouldn’t have taken a public outcry to make this change but I still appreciate that it is happening,” Anand said Tuesday night.

“The city did their part, now it’s up to the company to do theirs.”

Demanding that a Sikh shave his beard is like asking a non-Sikh to “peel off their skin,” Anand told the Star Monday.

“I told them, I belong to the Sikh community, shaving is not an option for me.”

The job losses began in April, the new release said. City staff had been inspecting work sites and deducting billable hours from contracted security companies for having employees who were not clean shaven.

The WSO complained about the layoffs in June, saying security service providers did not offer appropriate accommodation to their employees who have facial hair for religious reasons. The complaint was sent to city staff to resolve, sources said. Now, Toronto says it will allow the guards to wear “under-mask beard covers” as a “reasonable accommodation.”

That covering uses a “tight-fitting mask over a beard that covers the chin and cheeks, and ties in a knot at the top of the head,” the city’s release said.

“An N95 mask is then worn over the cover. The technique, also known as the Singh Thattha Method, is used by many Sikh people in the medical community and has been found to be highly effective in respirator fit testing.”

Before his 4 p.m. phone call to Anand, the release said Tory called the WSO to say the under-masking practice will go into effect “immediately.”

“This option was proposed by the World Sikh Organization of Canada and the City is grateful for this information. The City is also committed to followup meetings with the organization,” the release said.

Balpreet Singh Boparai, the lawyer for the WSO, said the organization received a call on Tuesday from Tory.

“He confirmed that the security guards could return to their jobs and the City would work with the security contractors to make it possible,” Boparai said.

The job losses may not be so easily resolved, he added.

“We are still waiting for the security contractors to get this message. A number of Sikh security guards had their shifts cancelled and they have not been invited to return to their positions.”

Source: City apologizes, seeks to rectify job loss after ‘clean-shave’ policy under fire by Sikh advocacy group

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Dyer : Judeo-Christian America: Why scholars reject GOP’s use of ‘Judeo-Christian’

2022/07/04 Leave a comment

Interesting and informative read:

On the right, the phrase “Judeo-Christian” has become like a password: It’s a short, fast way to prove your conservative ilk.

“We believe that America’s destiny depends on upholding the Judeo-Christian values and principles of our nation’s founding,” said former President Donald Trump recently at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference in Nashville, Tennessee.

“We know that this is a nation with a deep Judeo-Christian footing. We must defend it at every turn,” said Mike Pompeo at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February.

Explaining his decision to start the National Association of Christian Lawmakers in 2020, Arkansas state Sen. Jason Rapert remarked, “Our ultimate goal and intent is that we restore the Judeo-Christian foundations of our government that were intended from the very beginning.”

And, in Idaho in 2015, a group of Republican politicians cited the “Judeo-Christian bedrock of the founding of the United States” in their proposal to make the state formally Christian.

But experts say the phrase is problematic at best, with critics describing it as a sort-of “marketing campaign” that outstayed its welcome.

“The phrase is … a modern one arising from a contemporary political setting that elides a painful history between Jews and Christians in which there was a huge power differential,” said Malka Simkovich, Crown-Ryan chair of Jewish Studies and director of the Catholic-Jewish Studies Program at Catholic Theological Union.

She and others believe the term “Judeo-Christian” papers over the history of violent antisemitism that Jews faced in Christendom and collapses important theological differences between Judaism and Christianity, erasing Jews in the process.

“There isn’t such a thing as Judeo-Christian anything,” said Meredith J.C. Warren, a senior lecturer in Biblical and Religious Studies at the University of Sheffield.

Critics also say that the inclusion of “Judeo” gives a false sense of multiculturalism when the term actually serves to exclude Muslims, atheists and members of many other faiths. They’re hoping the phrase “Judeo-Christian” will soon be retired in favor of a more inclusive — and accurate — alternative.

What is the history of the term ‘Judeo-Christian’?

The origin of the phrase “Judeo-Christian” isn’t entirely settled: European scholars have noted that German theologians used the term in the early 1800s. Today, the term is sometimes used — problematically, Simkovich said — in reference to the “early followers of Jesus who lived in the Jewish community.”

In the American context, the term “Judeo-Christian” was part of “a redefinition of democracy that began in the ’30s in response to totalitarianism around the globe,” said K. Healan Gaston, author of “Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy” and a lecturer on American religious history and ethics at Harvard Divinity School.

In the wake of massive Catholic and Jewish immigration to what was then an overwhelmingly Protestant country, the phrase “Judeo-Christian” was also a response to anti-Catholic sentiment and antisemitism. It can be understood as an attempt to create tri-faith unity among the three religious groups that were, at the time, at the center of American life, Gaston said.

This unity was instrumental to the war effort and post-war nation building, becoming deeply linked to the American concept of democracy. The phrase became ubiquitous during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, though Eisenhower later backed away from the term privately when he realized how exclusionary it was, according to Gaston.

The term was handy during the Cold War as a way of differentiating America from our supposedly nonreligious, communist enemies, said Marc Zvi Brettler, a Jewish studies professor at Duke University and co-author of “The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently.”

“One of the times the term was really ascendant was as an anti-communist term,” Brettler said.

Some of that anti-communist residue lingers on the word today as the right often falsely depicts Democrats — a group that includes the majority of American Jews as well as Black Americans, one of the country’s most religious demographics — as godless, secular humanists at best and radical socialists at worst.

For the most part, from the 1930s to 1970s, it was liberals that used the term “Judeo-Christian,” said Gaston. But by the 1970s, the phrase began to gain currency with the right. And it took off in the 1980s with conservatives. Ronald Reagan included the term in his presidential platform, said Gaston, who explained that Reagan imprinted a “Judeo-Christian framework on top of deep-seated anti-communism and free market economics.”

After Reagan, Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority picked up the phrase and it came to be used in five subsequent Republican presidential platforms, Gaston said, but never on the Democratic side. It remains a shorthand for all of those ideas that Reagan loaded into the term, including free market capitalism, family values and other conservative ideals.

How do Jews feel about the phrase Judeo-Christian?

For some Jews, the inclusion suggested by the phrase “Judeo-Christian” has been comforting, said Gaston, adding that the Conservative movement has historically been somewhat more amenable to the term than the Reform and Orthodox movements.

But many American Jews have a complicated relationship with the term, said Brettler, a practicing Jew

While it’s “fine to talk about the commonalities between Judaism and Christianity,” he said that current usage of the term represents a “problematic construct that makes things much more hunky dory than they should be.”

The expression emphasizes “the similarities and almost entirely (denies) the differences,” between Christianity and Judaism, Brettler added.

There’s also a risk that people who embrace the phrase “Judeo-Christian” will deny the antisemitism experienced by early Jewish immigrants to the U.S.

Invoking the so-called “Judeo-Christian” foundations of the country, Brettler said, is “a type of fake nostalgia.”

Has the phrase caught on outside the U.S.?

The phrase “Judeo-Christian” — with an exclusionary meaning — has also caught on among the European right, particularly in France, according to Nadia Malinovich, author of “French and Jewish: Culture and Politics of Identity in Early Twentieth Century France” and a researcher affiliated with the Groupe Société Religions Laïcités at the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

“Jews have been re-centered as white societal insiders Europeans while Muslims are now cast as the primary others,” said Malinovich. The phrase, she added, is “being bandied about” as a cover for Christian nationalism

“Rather than saying ‘Christian civilization,’ it’s Judeo-Christian. … It’s a way of trying to cover up the fact that it’s just Christian by somehow getting the Jews involved ex-post facto,” she said.

Obliterating the theological differences and contemporary and historical tensions between Jews and Christians, Malinovich said, is, among other things, “disrespectful of the Jews who died in the Holocaust.”

Moving away from Judeo-Christian

The term “Judeo-Christian” omits the third Abrahamic faith — Islam — and erases its contributions to European history and, by extension, Western culture. The phrase ignores the fact that, historically, Jews lived with greater freedom and security in the Muslim world than they did in Christendom, said Warren.

In the American context, not only does “Judeo-Christian” exclude Muslims, Warren added, but also Indigenous communities.

“In North America specifically it’s important to foreground the rights and traditions of the continent’s First Peoples rather than erase them, too, with the phrase Judeo-Christian,” she said.

Many religion experts say the term should scrapped in favor of something more inclusive, like “interfaith.”

“Judeo-Christian” was “a brilliant civic invention that widened the country’s understanding of itself and reduced antisemitic and anti-Catholic bigotry,” Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith America, recently told the Deseret News.

“Now that America’s demographics have changed further — there are just as many Buddhists and Muslims in the country as there are Lutherans — it’s time to write the next great chapter in the history of American religion. And we think ‘interfaith America’ is the right title for that chapter.”

Rather than trying to create a melting pot in which individuals’ identities are subsumed into a larger national identity, we should strive for a potluck, Patel said, “where people’s unique identities are welcome contributions to the feast.”

Source: Judeo-Christian America: Why scholars reject GOP’s use of ‘Judeo-Christian’

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Census 2021 data shows Australians are less religious and more culturally diverse than ever

2022/06/29 Leave a comment

Canadian diversity data will be released this October. Religion will be included (10 year cycle in contrast to the standard 5 year cycle).

Some of the same trends occurring in Canada:

Australians are increasingly unlikely to worship a god and more likely to come from immigrant families.

The 2021 census has revealed a growing nation — more than 25 million people — that is more diverse than ever.

It also depicts a country undergoing significant cultural changes.

For the first time, fewer than half of Australians identified as Christian, though Christianity remained the nation’s most common religion (declared by 43.9 per cent of the population).

Meanwhile, the number of Australians who said they had no religion rose to 38.9 per cent (from 30.1 per cent in 2016).

The data also shows almost half of Australians had a parent born overseas, and more than a quarter were themselves born overseas.

The census — a national household questionnaire carried out every five years — took place in August last year amid the worsening COVID-19 pandemic.

The nation’s two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, were in lockdown and residents of regional New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT were about to join them.

Yet Australian Statistician David Gruen said the census was a success despite this challenge, with the household response rate rising to 96.1 per cent from 95.1 per cent five years earlier.

About four in five households submitted their answers online.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) will begin publishing census results today and release more data in coming months.

The information helps governments improve their services, and helps researchers and businesses better understand the community.

Beliefs and family traditions are changing

Christianity was the stated religion of about 90 per cent of Australians until 1966, when its dominance began to wane.

The ABS says migration has affected the trends since, though much of the change is due to the growth of atheist and secular beliefs.

The fastest-growing religions, according to the latest census, are Hinduism (2.7 per cent of the population) and Islam (3.2 per cent), though these worshippers remain small minorities.

The 2021 census was also the first to collect data since same-sex marriages were allowed in Australia.

Almost 24,000 of these marriages were officially recorded.

However, marriage itself is becoming less prevalent.

A generation ago (in 1991), 56.1 per cent of Australians aged over 15 were in a registered marriage. That has now dropped to 46.5 per cent.

New Australians are increasingly from India

Australia has long been one of the world’s great immigration nations, accepting more people than most other countries.

Last year, almost half of the population (48.2 per cent) were first or second-generation migrants, having at least one parent born overseas. That compares with 41.1 per cent 30 years ago.

Of the 27.6 per cent of Australians who were themselves born overseas, the most common country of birth was England.

However, India has become the second-most-common source country, overtaking China and New Zealand.

The census also asked Australians to report their “ancestry”, as opposed to their country of birth or ethnicity.

The top responses were English (33 per cent), Australian (29.9 per cent), Irish (9.5 per cent) or Scottish (8.6 per cent), with another 5.5 per cent saying Chinese.

…

Source: Census 2021 data shows Australians are less religious and more culturally diverse than ever

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