The Muslim Choice: Integration or Confrontation

2024/09/05 Leave a comment

Could also be written for many religions, the fundamentalist vs moderate:

…Two narratives about Islam have developed in western European countries, where Muslims are now a substantial minority presence. The first is of people from various countries settling into their new homes determined to live in peace with (if often at a distance from) their neighbours and the state. In several cases, these newcomers make a considerable contribution to public life: 25 Muslims were elected to the UK parliament in the July general election. The second narrative is of a group aggressively insisting upon their religious rights while they assert that they are the victims of comprehensive Western racism. Occasionally, atrocities are committed, usually by young Muslim men invoking Allah and at the deliberate cost of their own lives.

Likewise, parallel narratives have developed among the Muslim communities themselves. The first understands the West as a place in which they can live relatively well, practise their religion (or not) with little or no opposition, and enjoy freedoms often not available in their own—or their parents’—birth countries. A quite separate view sees relations with state authorities and native citizens in adversarial terms—a constant struggle against a colonial legacy of Islamophobic prejudice, hostility, suspicion, and barriers to freedom of expression and female dress that demand a militant response.

The attacks on mosques and individual Muslims during the August riots demonstrate that bigotry is still a problem among some cohorts of the UK population. But Islamophobia is also a much-abused and hotly contested term. Long before the summer riots, accusations of Islamophobia were used by those eager to deflect—or even reverse—blame for Muslim violence, and amplified by sympathetic parts of the media and some public figures. 

Yet polling does suggest that moderate British Muslim attitudes and communities are not a myth. In 2020, the Crest consultancy launched a research project that compared polls and focus groups of Muslims in eight towns and cities with a comparative group of the general population. The project concluded that: 

We found majorities of British Muslims trust the police, are concerned about Islamist extremism, support the aims of the [government’s counter-extremism] Prevent programme and would refer someone to it if they suspected that they were being radicalised. We found that the views of British Muslims frequently mirror those of the general population and even where they differ they rarely do so dramatically. 

Crest also found that British Muslims have a “broader range of views than is commonly acknowledged by politicians, the media and other participants in the debate on extremism.” The authors do not use the phrase “Muslim community,” since they believe the Muslim population is too diverse to make such a term useful. Instead, Muslims are seen as members of a common faith with differing backgrounds, ideas, and customs who have largely adapted to life in a new country.

As the August riots died down, another poll was conducted by More in Common, a think tank established in 2016 after the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox, and named after a House of Commons speech in which she said, “We have far more in common than that which divides us.” Its findings underlined the moderation of the British population as a whole and appeared to show that we do indeed have much in common in our views on extremism. Between 87 and 97 percent of respondents said, “The riots do not speak for me.” The outlier was Reform Party supporters, 41 percent of whom said that the riots did, in some measure, speak for them….

John Lloyd was a domestic and foreign correspondent for the Financial Times and a co-founder of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Source: The Muslim Choice: Integration or Confrontation

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Chris Selley: Gaza makes strange bedfellows — and maybe that’s a good thing

2024/08/14 Leave a comment

Of interest. Interesting type of intersectionality:

…Barely veiled threats aside, there’s nothing surprising about any of the foregoing. Few religions are bullish on things like homosexuality and gender fluidity, and Islam is no exception. When the Environics Institute last surveyed Canadian Muslims’ attitudes about the country, in 2016, it found just 36 per cent of Muslims felt “homosexuality should be accepted by society,” versus 80 per cent of Canadians overall. Just 26 per cent of Muslims felt it “should … be possible to be both an observant Muslim and live openly in a … same-sex relationship.”

And they’re allowed to think that. We put freedom of religion in the Charter and everything.

In some ways this just highlights the absurdity of left-versus-right thinking. Your opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict really should have no bearing on your opinions about same-sex marriage or the appropriate age, if any, for gender-reassignment surgery — or indeed vice versa. They are entirely unrelated issues.

I don’t consider myself especially conservative or right wing, so I’m not here to rep “my side” or score any points. But I will note that people on the left are often obsessed with bedfellows: If someone nasty agrees with you on something, that’s somehow a reflection on you. It’s a reason to reconsider your position.

It’s not a judgment progressives would want to invite on themselves, in this case. But if they’re capable of locking arms with social-conservatives to advance a common cause, I’m tempted to see it as a good thing more than a bad thing. We should all be able to look past our differences, even visceral ones, to make a better country.

Source: Chris Selley: Gaza makes strange bedfellows — and maybe that’s a good thing

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

Le Devoir Éditorial | Une foi en la laïcité

2024/07/29 Leave a comment

Of note:

Dans les années 1960, Dieu en a mangé toute une au Québec. Les hippies et leur révolution contre-culturelle basée sur une réinvention du concept de la Sainte Trinité autour des figures du sexe, de la drogue et du rock’n’roll ne furent pas les seuls responsables de ces bouleversements annoncés par la prophétie de Refus global.

Dans le tome V d’Histoire populaire du Québec, l’historien Jacques Lacoursière décrit avec acuité le contraste entre l’omniprésence de l’Église et son inexorable déclin. L’Église qui « semble partout est en fait nulle part », écrit-il en citant le professeur de l’Université de Montréal et membre du clergé Jacques Grand’Maison.

Le concile Vatican II ne ralentira pas la sécularisation du Québec. Pendant que les curés débattaient encore en 1970 afin de permettre la messe dominicale le samedi soir — ô révolution ! —, la société laïque attaquait par les voies législative et judiciaire l’édifice croulant du contrôle social par soutanes interposées.

Au diable les prescriptions sur le divorce, sur l’union libre, sur la contraception ou sur l’avortement ! Elles voleront toutes en éclats au cours des deux décennies suivantes. Le recul nous permet de constater que les premières lueurs de la laïcité furent indissociables des combats féministes pour se libérer d’un carcan social qui régentait la vie des femmes, de l’habillement jusqu’à la procréation.

Bien sûr, des intellectuels catholiques participèrent aux premières initiatives visant à rattacher Dieu à la modernité, sans parvenir à freiner un mouvement qui fera passer le religieux de la sphère publique à la vie privée. La transformation fut plus longue et moins radicale qu’il ne le semble à première vue. En effet, il faudra quand même attendre jusqu’en 2005 pour achever le projet de déconfessionnalisation des écoles et jusqu’en 2008 pour voir la création du cours Éthique et culture religieuse.

Dans Genèse de la société québécoise, paru en 1993, le sociologue Fernand Dumont constate, dans un bilan du siècle, l’érosion définitive de l’Église comme « organisme politique et instance de régulation des moeurs ». C’est l’un des plus merveilleux accomplissements de la marche permanente vers la laïcité. Ce n’est pas tant un legs de la Révolution tranquille qu’un long parcours d’affranchissement face aux dogmes et aux gardiens de la parole sacrée, qui ne cesseront jamais d’aspirer à la « revanche de Dieu », pour paraphraser le sublime essai de Gilles Kepel.

Pour en revenir à Dumont, celui-ci soulignait aussi dans son essai « le flottement de la culture collective » qui accompagne la laïcité. Dans une nation en constante recherche de ses repères, c’est sans doute la raison pour laquelle l’attachement nostalgique au catholicisme et à ses rituels (baptême, mariage) a persisté bien au-delà de la Révolution tranquille. Il en est de même pour l’adhésion à une « catho-laïcité », qui s’est plu à casser du sucre sur le dos des femmes voilées tout en se portant à la défense de la symbolique du crucifix à l’Assemblée nationale. Dieu merci, ce dernier a été remisé lors de la dernière offensive législative du gouvernement Legault.

Aujourd’hui, les Québécois se déclarent parmi les moins croyants et les moins pratiquants de tout le Canada, mais la ferveur religieuse suit également une tendance baissière dans les autres provinces. La ligne de fracture s’observe plutôt entre l’appui à la Loi sur la laïcité de l’État au Québec et sa diabolisation ailleurs au Canada.

Dans La laïcité du Québec au miroir de sa religiosité, les codirecteurs de l’ouvrage collectif, Jean-François Laniel et Jean-Philippe Perreault, soulignent les défis de penser le fait religieux au Québec alors qu’il semble en voie de glisser vers le statut de « corps étranger ou anachronique, en marge de la culture et de la société ». « La laïcité, dans sa volonté de neutraliser la religion, n’est pas neutre », formulent-ils.

C’est une autre façon d’envisager la Loi sur la laïcité. Celle-ci avait son utilité pour parachever l’oeuvre du rapport Bouchard-Taylor sur la crise des accommodements raisonnables, même si elle embrasse trop large en incluant le personnel enseignant. Avouons-le franchement, cette loi a autant à voir avec la marche vers la sécularisation que l’affirmation identitaire d’un groupe majoritaire entretenant une relation historique d’amour-haine avec le catholicisme. Un groupe qui projette désormais cette relation sur d’autres confessions qui n’avancent pas au même pas dans leur rapport évolutif au fait religieux.

Par l’un de ces paradoxes dont le Québec ne détient pas le monopole parmi les sociétés modernes, nous avons tué Dieu, mais nous ne sommes pas venus à bout de l’irrépressible besoin de croire, comme en atteste la montée en force de la spiritualité à base de tarots, de sorcellerie, de chakras ou de roches magiques. Nous aurions tort de penser que nous pourrons légiférer les croyances jusqu’à leur extinction, surtout pas dans une ère numérique où s’effacent les distinctions entre le public et le privé.

Source: Éditorial | Une foi en la laïcité

Filed under Religion Tagged with ,

Coren: Islam and Western Society

2024/07/16 Leave a comment

Note: Article dates from 2009 which I should have caught and his views, like most of us, have likely evolved somewhat.

—-

Surprising to see Coren writing for a more right of centre publication but he raises uncomfortable yet valid questions that his usual outlets might be uncomfortable with:

…Can Islam evolve, as has Christianity and Judaism? In that it is an exclusive monotheistic religion, it can never be as inclusive as Hinduism, but surely, as with Catholic or Protestant Christianity, it can hold to exclusive truth and still be tolerant of others who disagree. The problem is that there is limited evidence that this is happening. The Islamic heartland of the Middle East and Pakistan and even Nigeria and Indonesia evince a severe lack of acceptance for people who leave Islam for another faith, marry outside of the religion or criticize the founder, Mohammad, or the primary text, the Koran. Syria may not be as bad as Iran, Jordan may not be as bad as Saudi Arabia and Malaysia may not be as bad as Egypt, but it is only Turkey – where a militantly secular regime won a Kulturkampf against Islam, where anything resembling Western pluralism exists. It is, however, a pale imitation, and polls repeatedly reveal a personal intolerance of Christians and Jews unparalleled anywhere else in Europe.

In Canada, there have been several cases of so-called honour killings where fathers and brothers murder daughters and sisters who shame the family by becoming too Western. While this does occur outside of Muslim communities, it is overwhelmingly an Islamic phenomenon. Polygamy also occurs in Canada, with multiple and illegal marriages performed by Imams, and the police and judicial authorities are too timid to intervene. There are also cases of violent and hateful sermons delivered in Mosques, death threats made to critics and financial, moral and even physical support for foreign terrorists fighting and killing Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

This makes for depressing reading and paints a bleak picture of the Western, including Canadian, future. Obviously many Europeans already believe this, proved by the increasing support for right wing and sometimes even semi-fascist parties in countries such as Holland and Britain where tolerance is a way of life. We must also be extremely careful not to paint all Muslims with the same brush of suspicion. Most followers of the faith are peaceful people more concerned with paying the rent than preparing a rebellion. What, though, when Islam’s numbers grow and give it something other than cringing minority status? Christians in the Middle East will tell you that there are two radically different Islams: that of the minority and that of the majority.

If this problem is to be solved in a civilized manner, we have to transform the conversation and reform the vocabulary. First, the word “Islamophobia” must be expunged from the debate. It is meaningless, but it is used to silence contrary opinion and to place all critics of Muslim actions on the defensive. Second, there must be a collective show of courage and solidarity from assorted media and a willingness to display pictures and publish articles and books that, while not gratuitously offensive, are as cutting and critical of Islam as are those habitually drawn and written about Christianity. Third, we must hold Muslims to the same standard as anyone else and not indulge in the racism of lowered expectations. It is genuinely patronising to assume that a brown Muslim cannot act according to the same rules of civility and tolerance as a white Christian. Fourth, we must break from self-denial and admit that while we are not at war with Islam or Muslims, our liberal values are in conflict with many of the core concepts and precepts of Islam. We won the Cold War because most of us were prepared to say that capitalism, for all of its faults, was morally superior to communism. Today we are confused about what we believe, frightened to promote what we love and terrified of being seen as intolerant.

If enough people are willing to stand, read, write, act and know, we can carve out a new and successful West that includes the finer points of Islamic culture and history. If we are not – well, the thought is horribly rhetorical.

Source: Islam and Western Society

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Fatima Payman walked a path familiar to many of us – work within a system or disrupt it from the outside, Faith-based politics will be bad for social cohesion and Islam:

2024/07/06 Leave a comment

Two different takes, starting with the activist perspective of Sisonke Msimang:

Senator Fatima Payman has cut a lonely figure in the past week. The first-time senator has spoken with a clarity that is rare among politicians from the major parties. Having found her voice dissenting from her party’s tepid position on Palestine, Payman seems to have hit her stride. Her departure from the Labor party is no surprise, but as the decision loomed, it was clear that she had resonated with communities with strong ties to Palestine.

Since October last year, the Labor party has tried to walk a cautious path in the face of unfolding atrocities in Gaza. As Sarah Schwartz, executive officer of the Jewish Council of Australia, wrote this week: “While our government has called for a ceasefire, they refuse to name Israel’s crimes or take the material action many have called for under international law including implementing sanctions and throwing our weight behind a global arms embargo.”

Payman’s actions have put her former party’s failure to lead with a conscience in the face of horror under a microscope. In making Gaza an issue worth breaking with tradition for, Payman achieved a cut-through on Labor’s position on Palestine the party has thus far evaded. The spotlight was clearly not welcome.

In this fractious week, Payman has shown the nation that you don’t have to be the most powerful person in the room to have an impact.

The path Payman has walked is familiar to many people from marginalised communities across Australia. We are often the most vulnerable people in an organisation – lower paid, most burdened by systemic inequalities, most precariously contracted. And yet, because of the nature of the society we live in, we are frequently called upon to be courageous and to take hard stands in defence of the values of the communities we represent. We are often aware that if we don’t speak up, people in the mainstream are unlikely to understand the issues we are putting on the table.

A week ago, at the beginning of this saga, Payman invoked the memory of her father to explain the responsibility she felt to support Palestinian statehood. Insisting that she would not simply go along with party policy on a matter of principle, Payman said: “I was not elected as a token representative of diversity, I was elected to serve the people of Western Australia and uphold the values instilled in me by my late father.”

Those words resonated with many people I have spoken to in migrant communities across the country. Payman is like so many other women of colour who have pushed for change inside organisations that – whether intentionally or not – are hostile to ideas they don’t like or tone deaf to the effect they are having on minority groups. And like many others before her, Payman has had to make tough choices about whether to work within the system or seek to make change in more visibly disruptive ways.

Payman has refused to deny one of the defining issue of our times, but hers is also a story about what it means to try to play a broken game when you are part of a minoritised group in this country.

Though Labor has improved its diversity, its caucus is still overwhelmingly white. According to Per Capita thinktank research fellow and Labor activist Osmond Chiu, the proportion of non-European-background, non-Indigenous MPs in federal Labor is close to 10% whereas in the general population that figure is 25%.

Like others who enter largely monocultural spaces, Payman is confronted with a set of rules and procedures that have worked well for the majority but have significant drawbacks for those who haven’t always belonged to the club. To sway a caucus room, you need seniority and a certain kind of standing – commodities that take time to build and are not guaranteed even when young people, women and people of colour are outstanding at their jobs.

Even if Payman had been persuasive (and to be clear, the Labor party did not seem to be interested in being persuaded on this matter), she would likely have encountered an age-old problem: those who defend the status quo thrive by claiming issues raised by people from ethnic minority communities are themselves minor or tangential. We saw this in action when the PM expressed frustration this week about the fact that he was talking about Payman and Palestine instead of tax cuts.

The message was clear – Payman was a distraction and what he really wanted to talk about was cost of living and other matters regular Australians care about. The sub-text was rich.

As it turns out, Australians can walk and chew gum at the same time. They can appreciate the tax cuts and empathise with a young senator who has managed to elevate an issue that has been bubbling away for months but that has largely been treated as a foreign policy matter by the major parties. The war on Gaza isn’t simply happening over there. Seven decades into the Israeli occupation, Palestinians have created a formidable diaspora, and many of those people have created lives in Australia. They in turn have created networks and have friends and neighbours. In a multicultural society it is these types of ties that make it hard for so many of us to tolerate the bombing of Gaza.

As she leaves Labor, Payman reminds her colleagues that genocide is not someone else’s problem. Importantly, she is seeking to prove that if you choose to ignore a genocide, communities that have families, relatives and loved ones at risk overseas may feel that you don’t care about them either.

Politics is not easy for anyone, least of all for leaders from ethnic and religious minority groups. Some play an inside game, while others seek to make change from the outside. Both strategies are important. Pushing the destruct button can sometimes make progress easier for those who choose to remain inside.

This fierce woman, whose family made a new life here after fleeing Afghanistan, has much to teach us about self-determination. Surely the country that has praised itself for giving her shelter can accept that human rights for all means exactly that – in Gaza now more urgently than ever. Payman’s actions this week have been a reminder that if we allow it to be, speaking truth to power is the most powerful gift multiculturalism can give this society. We can all learn from that.

Sisonke Msimang is the author of Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home (2017) and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018)

Source: Fatima Payman walked a path familiar to many of us – work within a system or disrupt it from the outside

From the Australian PM:

The introduction of sectarian politics to Australia in the wake of Fatima Payman’s defection would risk further harm to social cohesion and be bad for the Islamic community, Anthony Albanese has warned.

The prime minister also rounded on Senator Payman by rubbishing her claims that her defection from Labor was spontaneous rather than orchestrated, and implying she should resign altogether and give back her Senate seat to the party that put her in parliament.

“Fatima Payman received around about 1600 votes,” he said of the Senate result in WA at the last election.

“The ALP box above the line received 511,000 votes. It’s very clear that Fatima Payman is in the Senate because people in WA wanted to elect a Labor government.

“And that’s why they put a number one in the box above the line, next to Australian Labor Party, rather than voted below the line for any individual.”

On Thursday, after six weeks publicly agitating against Labor’s position over the Israel-Gaza war, Senator Payman quit and moved to the crossbench as an independent for Western Australia.

She left open the possibility of forming a political party but said she did not intend to collaborate with The Muslim Vote, a group of Islamic community organisations based on a model in the UK that plans to run candidates against federal Labor MPs with large Muslim populations.

Senator Payman has met representatives of The Muslim Vote as well as micro-party specialist Glenn Druery, who has also advised the group.

Mr Albanese on Friday warned against introducingfaith- basedpolitics into Australia.

“I don’t want Australia to go down the road of faith-based political parties because what that will do is undermine social cohesion,” he said.

“My party has in and around the cabinet and ministerial tables people who are Catholic, people who are Uniting Church, people who are Muslim, people who are Jewish.

“That is the way that we’ve conducted politics in Australia. That’s the way you bring cohesion.”

There are many in the major parties who fear an Islamic political push could reignite Islamophobia, something with which Mr Albanese appeared to concur.

“It seems to me as well beyond obvious that it is not in the interest of smaller minority groups to isolate themselves, which is what a faith-based party system would do,” he said.

Source: Faith-based politics will be bad for social cohesion and Islam: PM

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , ,

Dejean | Faut-il tolérer la tenue d’activités religieuses dans l’espace public?

2024/06/20 Leave a comment

The latest Quebec religion/laïcité debate:

Une prière organisée le dimanche 16 juin par une communauté musulmane dans le parc des Hirondelles (Ahuntsic-Cartierville) a suscité une controverse, au point que la mairesse de l’arrondissement est allée en ondes pour justifier la tenue de l’événement. Il faut souligner qu’il ne s’agissait pas d’une première fois, mais la diffusion sur les réseaux sociaux d’une vidéo montrant des musulmans, en marge d’un rassemblement en soutien à la Palestine, priant aux intersections de Stanley et Sainte-Catherine n’est sans doute pas étrangère à la controverse.

Ces deux événements posent plusieurs questions : faut-il tolérer la tenue d’activités religieuses dans l’espace public ? Et si oui, à quelles conditions ? Et parmi les traditions religieuses qui organisent des activités religieuses dans l’espace public, l’islam fait-il l’objet d’un traitement différentiel ?

Dans une chronique en date du 12 juin, Richard Martineau déclarait : « Imaginez des gens avec des croix qui décident, eux autres, en plein milieu du centre-ville de Montréal, ils arrivent et puis ils prient avec des croix et puis Jésus et puis tout ça. On aurait raison de dire : “ça, c’est des crinqués”. Les gens diraient : “L’extrême droite chrétienne, l’extrême droite catholique, ça a pas de bon sens.” »

J’invite donc le chroniqueur à participer le 13 juillet prochain à La marche pour Jésus, qui correspond précisément à ce qu’il décrit. Lors de l’édition de 2023, plusieurs centaines de chrétiens — majoritairement protestants évangéliques — défilaient dans le centre-ville de Montréal (sur René-Lévesque et Sainte-Catherine), distribuaient des dépliants qui invitaient les passants à « donner leur vie à Jésus », tandis que des haut-parleurs diffusaient de la musique pop chrétienne. Étrangement, personne ne s’en est ému.

De la même façon, la présence de membres de l’Association internationale pour la conscience de Krishna, plus connus sous le nom des « hare krishna » en référence au mantra que les fidèles scandent en musique, à proximité de certaines stations de métro de Montréal ou encore les opérations de prosélytisme de prédicateurs évangéliques dans les transports en commun ne suscitent pas vraiment de réaction.

La controverse autour de la prière dans le parc des Hirondelles, tout comme La marche pour Jésus ou encore les nombreuses processions organisées par des groupes religieux à proximité de leurs lieux de culte, remet sur le devant de la scène la question de savoir si l’expression collective du religieux doit être autorisée dans l’espace public. Quand un chroniqueur comme Richard Martineau, dans la même chronique que celle citée précédemment, déclare : « Que tu pries dans une mosquée, que tu pries chez toi, j’en ai rien à foutre. Mais prier dans la rue, c’est une manifestation de force, c’est un symbole », il se positionne en faveur d’une limitation du religieux à l’espace domestique ou cultuel.

Cette position, assez courante, se fonde sur l’idée que la neutralité de l’État passe nécessairement par l’évacuation de toute manifestation religieuse de l’espace public. Une telle idée est rendue possible par l’ambiguïté de l’expression « espace public », à la fois « sphère publique » (domaine du politique et de la discussion démocratique) et espace géographique de circulation ouvert à toutes et tous (les rues, les places, les parcs…).

Si la laïcité implique bien une neutralité de la sphère publique envers les différentes traditions religieuses, il n’en va pas de même de l’espace public au sein duquel les différentes visions du monde (notamment religieuses) peuvent s’exprimer librement, dans les limites de ce qui est autorisé par la loi. Il serait d’ailleurs malvenu dans une société libre et démocratique que l’État en vienne à réguler l’expression des convictions de ces citoyennes et citoyens.

Pour autant, faut-il accepter toutes formes d’expression collective du religieux sur la base du respect de la liberté de conscience et de religion énoncées dans les chartes ? Il apparaît que non, et l’on a tendance à oublier que le premier article de la Charte des droits et libertés de la personne rappelle que ceux-ci ne sont pas absolus et peuvent être restreints « dans des limites qui y sont raisonnables et dont la justification peut se démontrer dans le cadre d’une société libre et démocratique ».

Ajoutons que, sur un plan pratique, la Ville de Montréal possède un Règlement concernant la paix et l’ordre sur le domaine public qui permet d’encadrer la tenue d’activités, quelle qu’en soit la nature. Par exemple, l’article 10 stipule que « l’initiateur ou l’organisateur de tout défilé, parade, procession, marathon, tour cycliste, doit présenter au directeur du Service de la circulation et du transport une demande d’autorisation à cette fin, au moins 30 jours avant la date prévue pour l’événement ». Sur cette base, il est possible d’évaluer de façon objective les conséquences, et les nuisances potentielles, de la tenue d’activités dans l’espace public.

Frédéric Dejean est professeur au département de sciences des religions de l’Université du Québec à Montréal.

Source: Idées | Faut-il tolérer la tenue d’activités religieuses dans l’espace public?

More reasonable, IMO, than the contrary view expressed by Nadia El-Mabrouk and the Rassemblement pour la laïcité: Idées | Les parcs ne sont pas des lieux de culte

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , ,

Removing religion as hate speech defence worth exploring: anti-Semitism envoy

2024/05/25 Leave a comment

Worth consideration but of course not without contention (Andrew Bennett, the former ambassador for religious freedom, currently at Cardus, appears to be ruling it out, unlike Lyons):

Canada’s special envoy for combating antisemitism is “very interested” in exploring the idea of removing religion as a possible defence against hate speech charges, she said Thursday, raising concern about creating a possible chill on religious expression.

Deborah Lyons, whose title also includes preserving Holocaust remembrance, made the comment before a parliamentary committee that is studying antisemitism on university campuses.

“I am very interested in exploring (it) as an option because I think, frankly, we are seeing it used in this country and in other places as a defence that frankly does not stand the ground in these very difficult times,” she testified Thursday.

Still, Lyons said she is not ready to offer a final opinion on the matter, and is still discussing it with Justice Department officials.

Jewish leaders, students and faculty have for months been voicing concerns over an increase in hate speech and violence since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war last fall.

Lyons said she believes universities’ equity, diversity and inclusion strategies are “failing Jews in this country” because they don’t make much mention of antisemitism specifically.

Her office is working to develop better training to counter anti-Jewish discrimination, which she hopes institutions, including governments, will use.

Members of Parliament also asked Lyons about the role police and prosecutors play in laying hate speech related charges, and whether Criminal Code changes are needed.

They pointed to a recent decision by Quebec prosecutors not to charge Montreal imam Adil Charkaoui over comments said during a prayer — a scenario Lyons says she is discussing with the government.

The comments were delivered at a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Montreal, and led to a complaint alleging threats and incitement of violence, which was investigated by the RCMP.

Leading a prayer in Arabic, Charkaoui had called on God to “take care of aggressor Zionists,” adding “O God, don’t leave any of them.”

Last week the province’s director of public prosecutions announced that a committee of three Crown attorneys found the evidence insufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the words amounted to an incitement of hatred toward an identifiable group, as defined in the Criminal Code.

Using the case as an example, Bloc Québécois MP Rhéal Fortin asked Lyons whether she supports his party’s proposal to eliminate a section of the Criminal Code that allows the use of religious beliefs or a religious text as a defence against the promotion of hatred and antisemitism.

The Criminal Code states that people shouldn’t be convicted of the willful promotion of hatred or antisemitism — defined as downplaying or denying the Holocaust — if, “in good faith,” they expressed an opinion “on a religious subject” or “based on a belief in a religious text.”

Fortin says his party wants to ban “exceptions” to hate speech based on religion.

“Certainly I think that it’s something we’ve got to continue to examine,” Lyons said.

Justice Minister Arif Virani’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

He is already seeking to increase the punishments for existing hate-related offences — including increasing the maximum consequence for advocating genocide to life imprisonment — in the Liberals’ legislation against online harms, tabled back in February.

The stiffer criminal justice reforms have fallen under harsh scrutiny from critics, including civil liberty advocacy groups, who say it could stifle free speech. Justice officials say criminal charges would only be laid in the most extreme examples.

Removing religion as a possible defence to a hate speech charge would likely be welcomed by those who oppose religion, but would create “genuine fear” for those who have deeply held religious beliefs about what they could say in the public square, said Rev. Dr. Andrew Bennett, who works at the public policy think tank Cardus.

“Often, religious people privatize their faith because they’re afraid that if I speak about what I believe, in good faith, in the public square, I’m going to be cancelled, or I’m going to be shut down,” said Bennett, Cardus’s faith communities program director.

He says if a “chill” is placed on religious expression it risks marginalizing a sizable part of the population, including many new Canadians for whom “religion is not just some sort of cultural relic” but “informs all aspects of society.”

“In many cases, they’ve come here because of the religious freedom we enjoy, and so to then say to those new Canadians in particular, ‘Oh, by the way, you can’t speak about your religion publicly for fear of being censured,’ I think that’s a very bad message to send.”

Bennett said the debate raises questions of how hate is defined and what makes a hateful view “different from a peacefully-held opinion that someone might profoundly disagree with?”

In the case of Charkaoui’s comments, Marco Mendicino, a Liberal MP, said he found the call by Quebec’s Crown not to press charges against the imam “incomprehensible and deeply problematic.”

Charkaoui’s comments were “perhaps one of the most egregious offences that I have seen” he told Thursday’s committee.

Mendicino, a former prosecutor who previously served as public safety minister, also cited other examples of demonstrators chanting offensive language, including glorifying Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks.

He believes “Zionists” fit the Criminal Code’s definition of an identifiable group, which refers to “any section of the public distinguished by colour, race, religion, national or ethnic origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or mental or physical disability.”

Source: Removing religion as hate speech defence worth exploring: anti-Semitism envoy

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , , ,

Barbara Kay: Radical Islam’s western fangirls

2024/05/22 Leave a comment

Not a great fan of Kay in general but I have to admit having similar questions (as with LGBTQ). Remember a tweet from one asking why Iranian Canadians were not similarly supportive with the obvious reason most of them fled the Islamic Republic of Iran:

….Hamas’s leaders knew that in these quarters, their atrocities would be perceived through a political rather than a moral lens. So they correctly assumed their pogrom would be characterized as “resistance” rather than wanton iniquity.

Hamas terrorists didn’t even shy away from filming themselves torturing women and children, which they should have considered a risk. After all, plangent appeals for the world to condemn Israel’s alleged genocide in Gaza, based on the war deaths of their own women and children, are a staple of the pro-Palestinian party line. The sight of the bloodied and raped female victims on October 7 could have been — should have been — a deal-breaker for feminists everywhere.

But it seems Hamas knew their female audience, too. One of the striking features about Hamas’s useful-idiot entourage is the robust support it enjoys from progressive women, in glaring contrast to the robust revulsion that should have prevailed among feminists.

Some women have publicly denied the vicious sexual torture inflicted on Israeli women, or shrugged it off as a sidebar to the sacred mission of “resistance.” This, they parrot, may entail “any means necessary,” including the degradation of women for no purpose other than malicious male pleasure. Evidence of western women’s indifference to Israeli women’s victimhood can be found in the fact that UN Women waited for months after the pogrom before condemning the rapes or Hamas.

A subset of anti-Zionist women appear to have taken their support to the next level. On some campuses, protesters are taking part in Islamic prayers. At UCLA, and elsewhere, to the consternation of some Muslim women living under Islamic regimes where the hijab is a symbol of oppression, some white female students bowing down in submission to Allah have taken to wearing hijabs in solidarity with their Palestinian comrades. Some young people have even reportedly converted to Islam as a result of the Israel-Hamas war, and others may soon follow suit….

Source: Barbara Kay: Radical Islam’s western fangirls

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It was once a center of Islamic learning. Now Mali’s historic city of Djenné mourns lack of visitors

2024/05/20 Leave a comment

Sad:

…Djenné is one of the oldest towns in sub-Saharan Africa and served as a market center and an important link in the trans-Saharan gold trade. Almost 2,000 of its traditional houses still survive in the old town.

The Grand Mosque, built in 1907 on the site of an older mosque dating back to the 13th century, is re-plastered every year by local residents in a ritual that brings together the entire city. The towering, earth-colored structure requires a new layer of mud before the rainy season starts, or it would fall into disrepair.

Women are responsible for carrying water from the nearby river to mix with clay and rice hulls to make the mud used to plaster the mosque. Adding the new layer of mud is a job reserved for men. The joyful ritual is a source of pride for a city that has fallen on hard times, uniting people of all ages.

Bamouyi Trao Traoré, one of Djenné’s lead masons, says they work as a team from the very start. This year’s replastering took place earlier this month.

“Each one of us goes to a certain spot to supervise,” he said. “This is how we do it until the whole thing is done. We organize ourselves, we supervise the younger ones.”

Mali’s conflict erupted following a coup in 2012 that created a power vacuum, allowing jihadi groups to seize control of key northern cities. A French-led military operation pushed them out of the urban centers the following year, but the success was short-lived.

The jihadis regrouped and launched relentless attacks on the Malian military, as well as the United Nations, French and regional forces in the country. The militants proclaimed allegiance to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group.

Sidi Keita, the director of Mali’s national tourism agency in the capital of Bamako, says the drop in tourism was sharp following the violence….

Source: It was once a center of Islamic learning. Now Mali’s historic city of Djenné mourns lack of visitors

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Phillips: Kaffiyeh ban unites all leaders, who are aware of Muslim voter influence in Ontario

2024/04/27 Leave a comment

Hard to maintain the argument that the kaffiyeh is primarily cultural given context, the statements of Sara Jama and the nature and discourse of protests. And as to Phillips using turbans and kirpans as a counter example, these are primarily religious, even if for some they also have a political significance.

Being sensitive to community concerns does not necessarily mean agreement given conflicting concerns among communities, as the current Jewish Palestinian tensions illustrate, and thus Speaker Arnott made the right call which needs of course, to be implemented with rigorous consistency for all political symbols:

The Speaker of Ontario’s legislature, Ted Arnott, has done something rare: he’s managed to get the leaders of all four parties at Queen’s Park united on a controversial issue.

Of course, they’re united against him — specifically against the ban he’s imposed on wearing Palestinian kaffiyehs in the provincial parliament, indeed anywhere in the legislative precinct that he oversees.

His decision has ignited a fierce debate: is the kaffiyeh, the checkered head scarf worn by Palestinians since time immemorial, cultural or political?

The answer to that binary question must be yes. It’s both — depending. The kaffiyeh has long been a cultural symbol of Palestinian identity. But wearing it has become more political, especially since the outbreak of the Hamas-Israel war last October.

That’s basically what Arnott said when he announced his ban. Wearing kaffiyehs “at the present time in our assembly,” he said, has become political. Arnott presumably thinks he’s just being consistent by banning kaffiyehs in line with established rules against wearing anything that “is intended to make an overt political statement.”

But what an unnecessary mess he’s created. This was a non-issue at Queen’s Park until Arnott issued his ban, apparently in response to a complaint by one unidentified MPP. It’s not as if there was a rash of kaffiyeh-wearing in the legislature. The only member who regularly wears one is independent Sara Jama, who was thrown out of the NDP caucus last year for her stand on the Mideast conflict.

Now we have the spectacle of Jama being told to leave the chamber for wearing a kaffiyeh. And a group of Arab-Canadian lawyers denied entry to the legislature when they wore kaffiyehs to a meeting with NDP Leader Marit Stiles.

I’m with the party leaders (including Premier Doug Ford) on this one. No doubt there’s a political dimension to wearing a kaffiyeh these days, but the long-established cultural tradition can’t be denied either. Why make an issue out of it at a time when feelings are running so high? Remember the fuss years ago about turbans and kirpans worn by Sikhs? In hindsight it seems like a fight about nothing.

Focusing on the kaffiyeh raises questions of consistency as well. What about wearing a tie or scarf in Ukrainian national colours? One of the Conservative MPPs who refused unanimous consent to overturn Arnott’s decision, Robin Martin, wore a necklace in the legislature emblazoned with “bring them home” in solidarity with Israeli hostages held by Hamas. Good for her, but wasn’t that also “political?”

Some have made much of the fact that party leaders opposing the ban may not be acting entirely for principled reasons, given the byelection set for May 2 in Milton where Muslim voters could make the difference.

I find it hard to be shocked by the notion of politicians acting for political reasons, and in this case the lesson to be drawn is “get used to it.” What’s happening in Milton is just a taste of how Muslim voters may have an impact in key ridings in the next federal election.

All provincial parties are courting Muslim voters in Milton, where 23 per cent of the population identified as Muslim in the 2021 census. The Liberal candidate, Galen Naidoo Harris, who isn’t Arab or Palestinian, has even made a point of wearing a kaffiyeh in social media postings.

Muslim voters are already an important factor in our politics. An organization called The Canadian-Muslim Vote identified more than 100 ridings in 2021where the Muslim vote exceeded the expected margin of victory. Many (including Milton) are in the GTA and will be fiercely fought over in the next federal election.

All the more reason for political leaders to be sensitive to the concerns of Muslim voters, as they’ve learned to be sensitive to the concerns of Sikh, Italian, Ukrainian, Jewish, you-name-it voters who aren’t shy about mobilizing their communities around issues that matter to them.

Banning the kaffiyeh is that kind of issue for an increasingly influential slice of voters. There are good reasons of principle to drop the ban. The politics of it point in that direction too.

Source: Kaffiyeh ban unites all leaders, who are aware of Muslim voter influence in Ontario

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , ,

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