German Elections 2017: How Russia Helped AfD’s Rise | Time.com

2017/09/27 Leave a comment

Interesting analysis of AfD’s support:

While fighting for a seat in the German parliamentover the last few months, Sergej Tschernow, a candidate for the right-wing Alternative for Germany, or AfD, knew that he could only rely on a few media outlets to give his party the coverage it craves: the Russian ones.

“They show our points of view in full,” he told TIME on Election Day, Sunday Sept. 24, when the AfD became the first far-right movement to enter into the German legislature since the end of World War II, winning a remarkable 13% of the vote and going from zero to more than 90 seats in a chamber of 631 lawmakers.

The party’s rise has been caused by a range of factors, not least the widespread frustrations with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose political party, the Christian Democratic Union, had one of the worst showings in its history on Sunday. It won only 33% of the vote – most likely enough to secure Merkel a fourth term in office, but hardly the commanding lead the CDU anticipated.

With its nativist stance against immigration and its attacks against the European Union, the AfD has managed to siphon a lot of votes away from Merkel by harnessing the anti-establishment sentiment that has swept through Western democracies in recent years. But one uniquely German reason for the party’s success has been the broad support it enjoys among the Russian emigrant community — bolstered by the noisy partisan reporting of Kremlin-backed broadcasters, whose reports on the elections reached millions of German voters through satellite dishes, on cable and online.

Who really votes for AfD

The AfD has estimated that about a third of its support comes from Russian-speaking voters, several million of whom have settled in Germany since the 1980s; they now make up as much as 5% of the population. On Sunday night, one of the leaders of the AfD, a vocally anti-immigrant and nationalist party, appeared to concede – somewhat paradoxically – that its core constituents are themselves immigrants.

“Take a look at who really votes for the AfD, and where we have the strongest numbers,” Jörg Meuthen, the AfD party whip, told Chancellor Merkel and other leading politicians during a post-election debate on German television. “It is precisely among these migrants, among people with an immigrant background who lead integrated lives here and who cannot believe what is happening to this country.”

While he did not specifically identify the Russian community, his party has devoted substantial resources to swaying this group of voters during the race this year. It translated its fliers and brochures into Russian, ran information stands and outreach programs in Russian-speaking neighborhoods, and catered its platform to the interests of this community. Among the AfD’s core pledges on foreign policy is to lift German sanctions on Russia and seek warmer relations with President Vladimir Putin. 

Source: German Elections 2017: How Russia Helped AfD’s Rise | Time.com

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Seeing the human side of Islamic State helps to defeat them: H.A. Hellyer

2017/09/26 Leave a comment

Looks like an interesting series and find Hellyer’s analysis sensible:

When The State was released on British television a month ago, there were those who decried it as a recruiting sergeant for the Islamic State. After all, the series does portray the four British Muslim citizens who travel to Syria as, well, human. So, obviously, the series must be a problem – for IS members cannot possibly be human. They must be insane, and their processes for becoming sympathetic to this veritable death cult cannot be familiar or recognizable in any way. Only that line of thinking is acceptable.

Except, that’s not true – and it is why the series, which was recently released in North America, is actually quite important. At no point does it represent IS in a sympathetic, positive light. On the contrary, the group is presented as despicable, grotesque, and abhorrent. There is really no doubt that can be left in anyone’s mind who watches the series. Yet, at the same time, the series seeks to present how people might actually be attracted to the group.

The sense of belonging, for example, that it purports to present – even though, as one can see in the series, that sense is ultimately a fraud. The desire to be a part of something larger than oneself – the defending of innocent people in Syria from a barbaric tyrant – which, again, is shown to be a fallacy.

But in the discussion around extremist Islamism, the discussion is often dominated by voices who do not want to see nuance. Nuance, it seems, is dangerous – because nuance, it appears, makes us go soft on extremists.

That’s utter garbage, of course – because nuance and genuine insight allows us to understand why IS recruiters might succeed. And if we do not understand how they succeed, we stand a much smaller chance at understanding how to counter their recruitment strategies, and immunizing people from them.

That’s not to say the series does not have its issues – it does. But those issues are less to do with the common complaints that have been thrown at it. The series was rigorously researched by the director and his team, particularly Ahmed Peerbux – and we saw the results through the way the worldview of extremist Islamism was presented on the screen for the audience. What we did not see, which is so deeply necessary, is how those characters on the screen led their lives prior to being successfully recruited.

If the series ever does come for a second season run, the writers should tackle what had happened to those characters that made them vulnerable to extremist recruitment. These are not aliens from outer space. Nor is it Islam that makes them into ticking time bombs. If the latter were true, then several million British Muslims would have already joined the radical group – an infinitely tiny proportion has done so.

Should the series tackle that prerecruitment phase, it’s likely they are going to find that a plethora of factors play a role. Yes, there is an ideological component, which is rooted in a particular reading of purist Salafism – and not all readings, mind you – a reading that ought not to be underestimated. But it is not ideology that is always the strongest component: indeed, it is probably in a minority of cases where ideology is the deciding factor in the impetus of radicalization.

Of course, that’s not the nuance that our public discussion around these issues is keen to hear. We want to hear that these young people are crazed nutcases; that the only thing that is important to understand is how evil the ideology is; and for a not-insignificant portion of the right wing and the left-wing parts of our political spectrum, that ideology is Islam, simply.

To recognize that these young people start out as hardly insane – though they are certainly fools – is not what we want to hear. Our populist demagogues don’t want to recognize that it isn’t Islam en masse that is to blame for this ideological construct that underpins the likes of Islamic State, nor do they want to recognize that ideology is only part of the phenomenon in the first place.

But while we may want to look for easy, black-and-white answers, life isn’t really that simple. Indeed, life is complex – it’s part of the urge to find such simplicity that allows some young people to be recruited in the U.K. by these depraved monsters. We will be able to disrupt their efforts far better when we realize and recognize that indeed, complexity is the name of the game.

Source: Seeing the human side of Islamic State helps to defeat them – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization Tagged with ,

The Real Story Behind Roald Dahl’s ‘Black Charlie’ – The New York Times

2017/09/26 Leave a comment

This is an interesting analysis, substantively as well as given Dahl’s various offensive views (we, of course, enjoyed the books with our kids notwithstanding):

Last week, Roald Dahl’s widow, Felicity Dahl, told the BBC that the children’s author had written an early draft of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” in which Charlie Bucket was black. Mrs. Dahl called it “a shame” that his agent persuaded her husband to make Charlie white. But what was in the draft, called “Charlie’s Chocolate Boy”? Catherine Keyser, an associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina who has written about “Charlie’s Chocolate Boy,” spoke with Maria Russo about that discarded version of the classic story.

Can you give a brief rundown of the plot of “Charlie’s Chocolate Boy”?

The setup is similar to “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”: There’s this magical chocolate factory, and its owner, Willie Wonka, is being inundated by children who want to visit it. So he decides instead of letting hundreds of children in, he’ll give seven golden tickets. So that’s more or less the same. There are two more children, and some of the names are different: Augustus Gloop was Augustus Pottle. The names are fantastic. There’s Veruca Salt, but also Marvin Prune and Miranda Piker. And of course Charlie Bucket — who in this version is a black boy, and is accompanied by his two doting parents.

All the others are white?

Yes. So Charlie ends up in the Easter Room, where there are life-size candy molds of creatures, and one of these life-size molds is shaped like a chocolate boy. Charlie is fascinated by this. Wonka helps him into the mold and gets distracted. The mold closes, and the chocolate pours over his body and he is suffocating and nearly drowning in it. And it hardens around him, which feels terrible. He’s trapped. He’s alive but can’t be seen or heard. No one knows where he’s gone. Then he gets taken to Wonka’s house to be the chocolate boy in Wonka’s son’s Easter basket.

Charlie is waiting for the mold to be cracked open the next day, when the son will get his Easter treat. That’s when burglars come into the house to steal millions of dollars and jewelry. Charlie has witnessed this — there are tiny eyeholes in the chocolate — but they never realized the chocolate boy was alive. So he groans and alerts Wonka and his wife.

Wonka has a wife?

That’s a huge change in the published version — Wonka is of course single in that, and Charlie becomes his heir. In this original manuscript he does not become his heir, because Wonka already has a son. So black Charlie is not invited to be part of the family. The big reward is that Wonka gives Charlie Bucket a store in the city center. He names it Charlie’s Chocolate Shop. And the happy ever after is that now Charlie owns this store, and his friends can eat whatever they want there.

When you started your research, had anyone else ever written about “Charlie’s Chocolate Boy”?

No. It was mentioned by Dahl’s biographer, Donald Sturrock, and it was mentioned in Lucy Mangan’s popular book “Inside Charlie’s Chocolate Factory.” But it had never been looked at in great textual detail.

Dahl has a reputation of being very offensive at times when it comes to race. How do you think this version would have changed the way we view race in his books?

As far as this version goes, I think it is a really powerful racial allegory that might seem very surprising coming from Dahl. I think the mold in the shape of a chocolate boy is a metaphor for racial stereotype. In the early 20th century, chocolate marketing in both the U.S. and England was very tied up in imperialist fantasies and in connecting brown skin with brown chocolate. In one British ad for chocolate, for example, you had a black figure holding a cocoa bean and happily bestowing it on white children.

So I think it’s neat that in this midcentury moment Dahl has this black boy get stuck inside a mold that fits him perfectly — he emphasizes that — everything about the mold fits Charlie, except once the chocolate inside the mold hardens, it’s uncomfortable! So what better symbol of what it’s like to be turned into a racial stereotype than a black boy who gets stuck inside a life-size chocolate mold and can’t be seen or heard through this chocolate coating.

So you’re saying this draft was antiracist, but then in the published book, the Oompa Loompas appeared, which made it into one of the most racially stereotyping books of its era.

Right. “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” is published in the U.S. in 1964, amid the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. and race riots in England. Dahl should have been aware that the “happy slave” was not a permissible stereotype. And yet in the original edition Oompa Loompas were a tribe of African pygmies. I think this arc — from what I find to be a fairly antiracist novel to the novel that has been rightly criticized for its racist and imperialist politics — what it really shows is Dahl’s ambivalence. I think we’re in the right cultural moment to understand that. Like Claudia Rankine has said, we need to understand how white people imagine race. And so I think it’s really telling that Dahl seems to identify with this vulnerable character. I mean, he himself was the son of Norwegian immigrants, and was bullied at British boarding schools. I think Dahl always felt like an outsider who was bullied into Britishness.

Yet he was someone often accused of anti-Semitic nastiness, and worse.

Yes! I think that’s the power of racism — to make someone able to hold these contradictory views at once. To both identify with the underdog and seem to understand the pain of stereotype, but then be completely flummoxed that anyone finds the Oompa Loompas offensive. He was genuinely surprised and very annoyed. So I don’t mean for this to whitewash Dahl’s racial politics. I just really love the vulnerability and the potential in this first draft.

Why did he change the story and make Charlie white?

He sent it to his literary agent and friend, Sheila St. Lawrence, and she immediately wrote back: Please don’t make Charlie black.

The depressing thing about all of this is that the whole message of “Charlie’s Chocolate Boy” seems to be how painful it is for a black person to be reduced to an object and treated with violence, and then the Oompa Loompas are all objects. Wonka tests his candies on them as though they were expendable.

It’s almost as if he transferred the original Charlie’s blackness onto the Oompa Loompas, to much worse effect.

That’s the other thing about this book — it ends up being about the virtuous white factory boy. Isn’t that where we’ve ended up now, as a society? We hear so much about the virtuous white workers, and it often seems to be taking black people out of the story. Charlie and the Oompa Loompas are very similar, both starving. All the other children are bad consumers because they eat without pleasure. So it’s really interesting to think about the book’s trajectory — Charlie becomes white, and he ultimately ascends in the Great Glass Elevator, the best metaphor for white privilege I’ve ever seen! And all the Oompa Loompas are back in the factory serving Wonka.

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Toronto’s Indigenous consultant resigns, files human rights complaint

2017/09/26 Leave a comment

From a reasonable accommodation standpoint, her right to practice smudging would need to be weighed against the overall ban against smoking and the effects of second hand smoke.

Will be interesting to see how complaint will be resolved:

The woman hired to help city hall improve its relations with Indigenous communities has resigned and filed a human rights complaint against the city, Metro has learned.

Lindsay Kretschmer, a Mohawk Wolf Clan member, was hired last March as a full-time Indigenous Affairs consultant in the city’s Equity, Diversity and Human Rights division. Part of her job was to liaise with local Indigenous communities and provide the city with expert policy advice, in line with the city’s efforts to respond to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report.

But her stint was short-lived. In early July, Kretschmer tendered her resignation over what she calls “disrespectful” treatment of the Indigenous file. She has since filed a complaint at the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, claiming the city violated her right to practise smudging, an Indigenous ceremony that involves burning sacred medicines.

“I waited for three months but I was never allowed to smudge in that building,” she said. She wanted Indigenous people to have a specific room at city hall where smudging can be performed, like the prayer/meditation room where members of any religion can pray.

City spokesperson Wynna Brown did not discuss specifics of the case with Metro but wrote in an email that the city has responded to Kretschmer’s application and “looks forward to the opportunity to present its case through the tribunal process.”

Kretschmer said she was later told she could smudge inside one of the managers’ offices — a response she regarded as “not dignified” because of the lack of privacy and personal space. One colleague even suggested she smudge outside.

“In 2017 you’re forbidding me from practising my culture. That’s essentially a repeat of colonization behaviour,” she said. “It’s just really bad to work there as an Indigenous person.”

Mayor John Tory has committed to increasing Indigenous presence at city hall, and the hiring of Kretchmer was seen as the first step. The city recently started acknowledging Toronto’s position on traditional Indigenous land at council and committee meetings. Indigenous flags fly on a permanent basis, and there’s a plan to give councillors and staff cultural competency training.

Tory’s spokesperson Don Peat referred Metro to strategic communications for answers on the case, adding the mayor “is committed to continuing to build positive relationships with Toronto’s Indigenous communities. He recognizes there is still much work to be done.”

At its meeting next Monday, the Aboriginal Affairs Committee will discuss the recruitment of a new consultant as they continue to work on the creation of an Aboriginal Office at city hall.

Kretschmer now believes that’s all “glamour” because there’s no concrete plan to promote Indigenous communities across the city. She says her hiring was just for show.

“It was a token position to make themselves look good, but they are doing nothing on the Indigenous file,” she said, adding there’s no Indigenous employment strategy and no budget to train staff.

“They are very far behind on that file. People are very upset with them. They’ve failed in so many ways it’s not even funny.”

Source: Toronto’s Indigenous consultant resigns, files human rights complaint | Toronto Star

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B.C.’s First Chief Judge [Begbie] haunts Law Society

2017/09/26 Leave a comment

The risks of hasty decisions and lack of fulsome discussion:

The ghost of pioneering B.C. justice, Sir Matthew Begbie — the Hanging Judge to some — has come back to haunt the Law Society of B.C.

The professional regulator’s benchers this spring unanimously exorcised from its lobby a statue of the legendary chief judge.

And they scrubbed references to him from the society’s image as offensive to Indigenous people.

But the colonial-era jurist who brought law-and-order to the two colonies that were the cornerstones of the province has not gone quietly into that good night.

And the decision to disown Begbie may yet prove to be just as controversial as moves in the U.S. to remove public symbols of the Confederacy or East Coast attempts to eliminate memorials of Halifax founder Edward Cornwallis, who issued a bounty on Aboriginal people.

The profession’s blue-chip journal, The Advocate, has rallied to defence of the province’s first chief justice.

In its unsigned editorial column entitled Entre Nous — Between Us, the august publication this month says that the move is “perhaps even a step in the wrong direction — than a purposeful and reasoned step toward reconciliation.”

“By removing the Begbie statue from the Law Society lobby, our governing body is now telling us that Begbie’s legacy has but a single dimension which is antithetical to truth and reconciliation,” asserts the magazine that goes to every lawyer in the province.

It added: “With great respect to the intentions of the parties, we think the recommendation to remove the Begbie statue and the acceptance of that recommendation are both misguided. … We fear that the rush to reconciliation has trampled a principled approach with one unintended consequence being estrangement rather than reconciliation of interested parties.”

Editor Michael Bain said many lawyers have already told him they want the society to revisit the issue as it was forced to do over its initial approval of a law school at Trinity Western University.

“I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations and a lot of reaction to it,” said the Vancouver lawyer. “It has definitely struck a nerve … and the impact of it happening on the profession I think has been to give people pause as to what the benchers are doing or how they are doing it.”

Published by the Vancouver Bar Association since 1943, the magazine’s masthead bears a who’s who of the profession — Christopher Harvey, Q.C. David Roberts, Q.C., Court of Appeal Justice Mary Saunders, Peter J. Roberts and Provincial Court Judge William F.M. Jackson.

The editorial acknowledged a certain amount of anxiety about wading in on the issue “but just as the first tentative steps into the ice-cold mountain lake can result in a terrified skip back up the slope, usually it is the icy plunge itself that yields the better reward.”

It then proceeds to kick the intellectual stuffing out of the society’s decision — citing the historical record to show the renowned legalist was ahead of his time and a supporter of Indigenous people.

A Cambridge-educated Chancery barrister and member of Lincoln’s Inn, Begbie arrived in what is now B.C. in 1858 at the age of 39.

“He learned a number of Indigenous dialects and even conducted trials in those languages. He had great friendships with a number of chiefs … he was clearly sympathetic when it came to trying to impose colonial law on Indigenous people. He recognized the concept of Aboriginal marriage and allowed an oath for truth-telling that recognized Aboriginal beliefs. In fact, he was surprisingly enlightened for a 19th-century Englishman when it came to understanding and interacting with Aboriginal peoples.”

Nevertheless, the Law Society indicted Begbie for presiding over four trials in which six of nine accused Tsilhqot’in warriors were convicted by juries for murdering white road-builders.

Indigenous people have long insisted the executed chiefs were freedom fighters protecting traditional territories from the encroachment of settlers.

Moreover, the chiefs surrendered only after threats to slaughter Indigenous women and children.

In 1993 the NDP Attorney General apologized for the hangings and in 2014 Liberal Premier Christy Clark confirmed the exoneration of the chiefs.

“The whole affair seems quite unseemly — indeed, Begbie’s contemporaneous writings reveal his decided unease about the outcome — but we are still trying to grasp what it is that Begbie did wrong,” the editorial maintains.

“He did not pass judgment himself but he did pronounce the mandatory sentence as the law required him to do.”

There is another Begbie icon outside the New Westminster courthouse and three mountains, two lakes, a creek, an elementary school, streets and other sites across B.C. bear his name.

The society made its decision to erase Begbie without consulting the membership, though it noted many lawyers would disagree with the move.

“I’m not sure it’s the proper road towards reconciliation in my view,” Bain said. “I would have thought more dialogue would have been helpful rather than less.”

Source: B.C.’s First Chief Judge haunts Law Society | Vancouver Sun

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ICYMI: German government adopts international anti-Semitism definition | DW | 20.09.2017

2017/09/26 Leave a comment

Most comprehensive article I have seen. Just in time before the AfD’s relatively strong result.

But no article appears to mention what the small differences in the definition consist of:

The official definition of anti-Semitism was drawn up by the government’s conservative Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere and Social Democratic Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel. It is almost identical to the one proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) used by countries around the world, including, for instance, Britain and Austria.

The IHRA definition reads: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

The definition was adopted after the government’s regular Wednesday morning cabinet meeting. De Maiziere stressed the importance of consensus on the term in Germany, which is still plagued by various manifestations of anti-Semitism.

“We Germans are particularly vigilant when our country is threatened by an increase in anti-Semitism,” said the interior minister. “History made clear to us, in the most terrible way, the horrors to which anti-Semitism can lead.”

Defining anti-Semitism may seem to be self-evident, but it took considerable time and effort for Germany to agree to a specific wording. Other countries were quicker take up this definition.

“I very much welcome the adoption of the working definition of anti-Semitism by the German government,” said Felix Klein, head of the German delegation to the IHRA and the Foreign Ministry’s special representative for relations with Jewish organizations. “In order to address the problem of anti-Semitism, it is very important to define it first, and this working definition can provide guidance on how antisemitism can manifest itself. We are proud to join Austria, Israel, Romania, Scotland and the United Kingdom in affirming that there is no place for anti-Semitism in any society and we call on other states to follow.”

The cabinet has recommended that law-enforcement and other public officials use the official definition.

A first step and framework

The adoption of the IHRA definition fulfills one of the recommendations of an independent expert commission on anti-Semitism issued in April. Commission member and Green parliamentarian Volker Beck called it “a first step.”

“The adoption of the definition sets out a framework,” Beck said in a statement. “Government action on various levels – from legal prosecution to educational measures to the sensitization of the judicial system – is now more binding. We can create a common understanding in government of the problems and challenges and a evaluation framework for preventing and combating [anti-Semitism].”

Critics of the IHRA definition say it fails to distinguish between anti-Semitism and legitimate criticism of Israel

Beck had previously criticized the government for failing to act on the commission’s recommendations. A definition, the commission argued, was essential for classifying and prosecuting anti-Semitic crimes and for distributing money to prevention programs. In the past, the task of cataloging anti-Semitic crimes as such has fallen to private organizations like the Antonio Amadeu Foundation.

As the commission detailed in its report, today’s anti-Semitism takes forms as different as extreme-right xenophobic fears of a global Jewish conspiracy and Israel-focused hostility toward Jews among Arabs and other Muslims. Other government cabinet members stressed that anti-Semitism in Germany could not be reduced to any single group.

“Unfortunately, anti-Semitism is pervasive throughout this society,” said Minister for Family Affairs Katarina Barley in Berlin.

That sentiment was seconded by the director of the Anne Frank Education Center in Hessen, Meron Mendel, who warned against reducing modern-day anti-Semitism to Muslim migrants and refugees.

Arson against a synagogue as ‘non-anti-Semitic’

Critics of the IHRA definition say it fails to distinguish adequately between anti-Semitism and legitimate criticism of Israel. But Jewish groups in Germany welcomed the cabinet’s decision precisely because its description of anti-Semitism also applies to excessive criticism of Israel as a “Jewish collective” and not a nation like many others.

“It’s as important to combat anti-Semitism dressed up as putative criticism of Israel as to fight against the old stereotypes about Jews,” said the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Joseph Schuster.

Schuster added that Wednesday’s decision would be of help to police – a sentiment seconded by Deidre Berger, the director of the Berlin Ramer Institute for German-Jewish Relations of the American Jewish Committee.

“The lack of a unified definition has led to anti-Semitic incidents being all too often ignored in recent years,” Berger said. “The fact, for example, that the courts considered an arson attack on a synagogue in Wuppertal as non-anti-Semitic illustrates the necessity of a definition.”

Berger called for police training on the subject and for the next government to appoint a permanent anti-Semitism commissioner to ensure that the commission’s recommendations were implemented.

Source: German government adopts international anti-Semitism definition | Germany | DW | 20.09.2017

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Making a home on native land: Adrienne Clarkson on the welcoming way to be Canadian 

2017/09/25 Leave a comment

Always worth reading her reflections as the 6 Degrees Citizen Space 2017 begins:

It was Robert Frost who told us in The Death of a Hired Man that “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Home is the ultimate refuge, the place of obligatory belonging, the destination of the spirit. The idea that, ultimately, there is a place where you belong, a place which is acknowledged, is a compelling one. We all want to feel that we have a home: security, trust, understanding – all are a part of what we feel our personal home is.

In this time of increased migrations, it’s worth considering once again the notion of home: the kind of home that Canada has been, is, and will be, for many.

Canada’s original residents gave an introductory lesson in “home,” as they welcomed newcomers – Europeans – to their land, and helped them learn how to survive. In a tragic irony, it is their First Nations descendants who now find themselves exiled from a sense of belonging, often literally homeless as well as uprooted from a sense of this land as home.

We would do well to reflect on what we have – or haven’t – carried forward of their welcoming legacy, and on what kind of home we offer to newcomers who come after us.

In the 1948 United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights, Article 12 says “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.”

Home is a feeling as well as a shelter. It is what makes the phrase “feeling at home” or ” chez soi” meaningful. Those of us who were lucky enough to have parents until we were adults identify home as where we grew up, where, hopefully, we were loved and cared for until we could face the world ourselves. In the fortunate industrialized world, this means we went from our parents’ care to our own homes, modelling our futures on our past.

Even though I came to Canada as a refugee, I came with my family intact – mother, father, and brother. We had suffered serious trauma, having to abandon our home under bombardment, hiding in basements and watching an enemy, the Japanese army, occupy and destroy.

My family’s house in Hong Kong was looted and my mother saw our household furniture, the baby grand piano, the hand-painted heirloom china, and the silver tea and coffee service sold on the street. Our dog, a borzoi called Snow White, who had run away during the bombing, returned to us with human entrails in her mouth. Our home in Happy Valley was taken away from us and defiled.

When we made our way toward Canada on that Red Cross ship with one suitcase apiece, we had lost all our tangible bearings. But what was within us could not be destroyed. What was in us was the will and energy to begin again – in a new place, no matter how tough.

Despite the Chinese Exclusion Act, an active law intended to keep Chinese immigrants out of the country, we managed to settle in Ottawa, which was then a city of 90,000 people.

Here, the only Chinese either owned restaurants or laundries. But it was the Anglican church that welcomed us and made us feel at home, and that gave my mother, who was Hakka – and whose family had been Anglican for four generations – help and confidence. Coming from Hong Kong, we all spoke English, as good colonials should.

I often think of this when I think of the surge of people around the world, the millions on the move, swelling the refugee camps where they languish for not months, but years, waiting for the opportunity to leave. In Canada, our challenge is to make immigrants feel that they have found the place where, when they had to come here, we had to take them in.

Integration isn’t always a matter of getting lost in the crowd. Sometimes a sense of home can be built in places that may seem insular at first – not Toronto or Vancouver but Moose Jaw or Red Deer. As governor-general I went to Red Deer 15 years ago because they wanted to show me that their population mosaic was as great as Toronto’s. They had jobs to offer there and they were welcoming newcomers.

Among the 300 people who greeted me, 24 countries were represented. Filipinos, Chinese, Kenyans – all got up and spoke about the advantages of coming to what was at that time a city of 75,000 people. Initially, they said, they stood out as foreigners – they were stared at, but they found they could live through that, and if someone directed a racist epithet at their child, someone else would say, “I know his mother – she works at my local Tim Hortons.” And so they felt they quickly became part of a community. They all said that if they had known that they would have to go to a small city to find work, rather than settle in Calgary or Edmonton, they would have said, “No thanks.” In a big city, you can find others like you – whether you like them or not – but you will never be a novelty or different, in the best sense of the word.

People of my generation remember being the only South Asian family in London, Ont. or the only Chinese in St. John’s. It’s not possible to hide in communities of that size, and I’m of the belief that this isn’t such a bad thing. I have a leaning toward the “So I am different. Let’s get that over with now” school of integration. It will cause discomfort for newcomers, but is being stared at in a street or in a store too high a price to pay for establishing yourself in a country in which you are free to choose where you want to live and how you want to live?

My parents would emphasize to me that, in Hong Kong, they would not have been able to afford the kind of education we were getting for free in Ottawa – wasn’t it worth enduring some gawking on the first day of school for that? We must never interpret social awkwardness as an insurmountable barrier to belonging, nor bad manners as an ultimate form of rejection.

True, ugly racism manifests itself in other ways which we can address and combat as a society within our legal system. Some personal suffering, some loss of dignity, some sense of being excluded – all can be steps in a kind of Calvary that leads to acceptance and feeling at home. So many of us who are Canadians now have had to go down this road in the past.

Those of us who came to Canada like me, a refugee, or those who chose to leave their birth countries and chance something different, something more, have risked that we can go somewhere and be taken in. In Canada, we are in a position to take people in. And they will arrive to our cities and to our towns and communities. There will be room made for them. Or, they will make viable room for themselves in what The Globe’s Doug Saunders has described so vividly as “arrival cities”: What looks like disorder and distress can actually be an organic chaos leading to the innovative organization of a home.

We are supposed to be a healthy and prosperous country – one that is known to shelter and provide for its citizens. Unfortunately, despite this, we have the stigma of unacceptable homelessness and poverty in our country. We know that 235,000 Canadians experience homelessness each year, and that 35,000 are homeless on any given night. Twenty per cent of our homeless population is made up of people between the ages of 16-24. It is shameful that our Indigenous peoples are overrepresented in our homelessness population: One in four people who experience homelessness identify as Aboriginal or First Nations. We want to welcome newcomer families to our country, and yet somehow Canadian children and families are the fastest-growing demographic experiencing homelessness today. All this is a national disgrace.

We must adhere to the values that make this country a desirable place to settle in: “So the last shall be first, and the first last,” as the Bible says. We have means enough to focus our resources on the people who need them most, wherever they may be from.

What we have to do in Canada is assure that the place that has to take people in can offer a real home to them and to the people who are already living here. We must be certain that we are always working toward an egalitarian standard of living. We must give ourselves the goal of eliminating the blight of homelessness, the institutionalizing of food banks, the disgrace of filthy water on our reserves.

Over 40 years ago, in 1976, when we started the CBC’s investigative news programme the fifth estate, we opened a working file on bad water at Grassy Narrows. Several months ago, there was a story on bad water in Grassy Narrows in The Globe and Mail. We do have to wonder, What the hell is going on? For our Indigenous peoples, a home must be the place where they are cared for and valued, just as much as we cared for the strangers who arrived and needed to be taken in.

We must never forget that the Indigenous peoples took us all in as strangers, opened their land to us, and shared their skills and their knowledge so that we could live in a country with a rude, difficult climate and impossible terrain. Through the waterways and in their canoes, we mastered this land and called it home. It is our duty and obligation – and a part of being a citizen – to make sure that home is bountiful for all of us.

Source: Making a home on native land: Adrienne Clarkson on the welcoming way to be Canadian – The Globe and Mail

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Who Put The ‘Hispanic’ In Hispanic Heritage Month? : NPR

2017/09/25 Leave a comment

Interesting history and example of how political level, civil organizations and officials responded to needed change:

And then by 1980, the term Hispanic shows up for the first time on a census form. How did that happen?

One wouldn’t necessarily think of [President Richard] Nixon as a champion of Latino rights or Latino identity. But he was open to hearing Latino concerns, in part because he grew up in Southern California, in a context where he knew Mexican-Americans existed. And they were different. Their lives were different; their experiences were different from whites. In 1972, he created the first comprehensive ‘Hispanic vote’ political campaigns at the presidential level that the country had ever seen. Nixon had what he called “amigo buses” that roamed around the Southwest but also the Northeast and into Florida. Those that roamed on the East Coast played salsa and cumbia and those that roamed in the Southwest played mariachi. This was before the Democratic Party did anything close to this. And the Nixon administration also pressured the Census Bureau to create an advisory board comprised of the Mexicans and the Puerto Ricans, who were incredibly loud, and also some Cuban sympathizers that had been big contributors to Nixon. One of the biggest points of debate is: What would this group be called on the census?

How did they choose the term ‘Hispanic’?

Some of the advisory members said, “Hey, why not use ‘brown’? We don’t fit into these white, black, Asian categories. That’s not us.” Now, if you’re a demographer, if you’re a statistician, that seems like an incredible nightmare. You know, brown can mean Filipinos. Brown can be Native Americans. Brown can be South Asian Indians. This was a complete non-starter.

They went down the list. Latin American. One of the problems is that Latinos were seen as foreigners, invaders and not inherently American. And one of the jobs of the advisory board was to really show that Latinos were an American minority group, like African-Americans — a minority that stretched from coast to coast and that were patriotic, that fought in wars, that contributed to American history, that built American cities. So when a term like Latin American was used, right away, it seemed to strike discord because it was seen as too foreign.

Hispanic was never a term that everybody loved, but it was a term that got a lot of support from within Latinos in the Nixon and, later, the Ford administration.

And, then, how did they make it stick?

The Census director called all the Latino advocacy groups that were being set up in Washington, D.C. — the National Council of La Raza; the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and said: “HELP.” NCLR set up town halls in places like Miami, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, showing people the new census form and telling them, “Look, we’re Hispanic. This is us. This is our chance. This is our category!” The second phone the Census director picked up was to Spanish-language media. At that time, the company that would later go on to be called Univision was growing rapidly. They ran documentaries, commercials, even a day-long telethon, where different performers from across Latin America came out. Each of them held out the census form and says, “Hey, remember to fill out the census. We’re Hispanic on the 1980 census. This is important for us.”

How did we get from arguing for totally separate identities like Mexican, Puerto Rican and Cuban, to me calling myself a Latina?

Because it takes on a life of its own! Once the category was made, everything from political groups to civic organizations to every other media group that would emerge, would draw on census data. As soon as the census numbers came out, Latino lobby groups could then run the numbers and say, ‘Look, this is what Latino poverty looks like; this is what Latino educational attainment looks like.’

They could go up to the Department of Education, for example, and say, “Latinos are the second-largest minority group. And yet, our educational attainment pales to that of whites. Send money to our schools.”

The same exact thing happened in the market. As soon as the numbers came out, Univision releases the first Hispanic marketing manual, in which they take figures like income, and they call it “Hispanic buying power.” And they take the census report and make pitches to McDonald’s and Kellogg’s and everybody else. And they start to slowly grow.

During the 1980s, Latino political organizations started to demand that not only should we have a Hispanic category in the census, but we damn well should have it on birth certificates. Michigan, Georgia, Louisiana — they still categorize Latinos as whites. And there was a large political push among these groups, with even Spanish-language media writing to them and saying, ‘Look, put us down as Latinos. We’re not white. We’re distinct. We’re different.’

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Robert Fulford: A history of ‘Islamophobia,’ a word of dubious value

2017/09/25 Leave a comment

I always find it surprising that some people can can devote column space to the word Islamophobia without any discussion of the real world issues of discrimination and prejudice that many Canadian and other Western Muslims have experienced. This is essentially a more sophisticated version of the earlier commentary by Candice Malcolm (M-103 weaponizes what a ‘phobia’ is).

A cop-out IMO. One could argue that an excessive focus on the word Islamophobia is in itself a reflection of Islamophobia (or if you wish, anti-Muslim attitudes):

Every era has special words that ignite resentful arguments and reveal difficult emotions. There’s no doubt that Islamophobia is our word, a painful term that’s hard to avoid.

It functions as a rhetorical weapon. Whoever uses it (and many do) is trying to convict someone else of chauvinism and a thoughtless prejudice against Muslims and Islam. It’s a protective word, a shield against Muslims being damaged by criticism and argument.

Pascal Bruckner, the French philosopher, who has spent a great deal of time working on this issue, summarizes his opinion in a few words: “There’s No Such Thing as Islamophobia. Critique of religion is a fundamental Western right, not an illness.”

A phobia is a medical term, an anxiety disorder stirred up by irrational fear of heights, or perhaps spiders or snakes and other repellent creatures. Few would confess to feeling that way about Islam. Fewer still would seek treatment of their negative reactions to Islam.

Islam is a titanic force in this era and we talk about it and write about it often. But we hardly know how to express ourselves. We stutter and stammer when it comes up and sometimes we may use words like Islamophobia to censor ourselves. From Barack Obama down we have wrestled with attempts to define Islam or interpret it. Obama actually said that the Islamic State is not Islamic, as if he would know. He said Islam is a religion of love and peace, to which the only honest reply is: Sometimes Yes, sometimes No.

Our thinking on this subject can be affected by a sense of guilt, conscious or unconscious. Many Muslims are from places conquered and then dominated by European imperialists. Bruckner has investigated this fact in his book, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism.

“Nothing is more Western than hatred of the West,” Bruckner says. “All of modern thought can be reduced to mechanical denunciations of the West, emphasizing the latter’s hypocrisy, violence, and abomination.”

The hard truth is that many non-Muslims find it difficult to speak about (or to) Muslims. Our intentions are confusing, even to us. We hope for good relations with Muslims who live among us and we assume that they are as appalled as we are by violence committed in the name of their religion. We also hope they know that Islam, though sacred to them, is also the scourge of millions when it’s interpreted literally by blindly self-righteous mass murderers.

We know they seem more sensitive, in a way, than others. They can’t easily shrug off humiliation. Le Monde in Paris pointed out that Charlie Hebdo, the satire magazine, devoted only four per cent of its covers to ridiculing the Prophet Mohammed; meanwhile, the same artists had been mocking Jesus, Moses, the Dalai Lama, and the various popes for 40 years. But Islamist killers were so offended by the four per cent that, in January 2015, they assassinated most of the staff.

Le Monde’s comparison means nothing. The killers could reason that Jesus, the popes and the rest are of little importance. The Prophet, on the other hand, is a crucial figure in their daily lives and they must protect him from humiliation.

Bruckner is of course right when he says that critique of religion is a fundamental Western right, but committed Muslims are not entirely in the West. They are in a larger place, the world they imagine, where no such right exists. Perhaps they know that Christianity and Judaism broke into pieces because their rules permitted serious, long-ranging criticism of their most basic principles.

The word Islamophobia originated in the early 20th century. An early use was in a French biography of Muhammad (“islamophobie”). Sometimes it was used internally, within Islam, to identify a fear of Islam felt by liberal Muslims and Muslim feminists, rather than a fear or dislike of Muslims by non-Muslims. It was given an official imprimatur in 2004 when Kofi Annan, then the UN Secretary-General, said the word Islamophobia had to be coined in order to “take account of increasingly widespread bigotry.” From there on it was part of language, a word of dubious value.

Source: National Post | Full Comment » Full…

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Worlds of Islam, Michael Jackson collide in Egyptian film | Fox News

2017/09/25 Leave a comment

Interesting and risky film to make:

An Egyptian ultraconservative Muslim preacher hears on his car radio news of the death of Michael Jackson, the pop singer he idolized in his teens, and he becomes so distraught he crashes his car.

The news of the passing of the King of Pop is the start of a crisis of conscience for Sheikh Khalid Hani, the main character of the movie “Sheikh Jackson,” Egypt’s first feature film to focus on the religious movement known as Salafis, followers of one of the strictest interpretations of Islam.

It follows Sheikh Hani, a Salafi, as his love for Michael Jackson throws him onto a bumpy journey to discover his own identity, mirroring how Egypt’s conservative society is torn between its Islamic and Arab traditions and Western culture in an age when television, telecommunications and social media bring together people and cultures from all corners of the world.

“I no longer cry while I am praying. That means my faith is faltering,” Hani confides to a female psychiatrist in one scene. Crying while praying, he explains, reflects his fear of God.

The film goes beyond examining Salafis, says the director, Amr Salama. “It’s about humanity … It tells you that one’s identity is not a single dimension or an unchangeable thing,” he told The Associated Press just days before “Sheikh Jackson” premiered in the Toronto Film Festival earlier this month.

It’s a journey Salama has some experience in: He was a huge Jackson fan in his teens and then became Salafi during his university years, before moving away from the movement.

Salafism is one of the most closed, uncompromising visions of Islam. Its doctrine is primarily built around what its followers believe is emulation of the actions the Prophet Muhammad. They are easily recognized by their chest-long beards, robes that reach to just below the knees. They shun music, film and dance and outside influences seen as decadent. Salafi women wear the all-covering niqab, including veils over their faces.

Followers view life as a little more than a transitional phase and are contemptuous of worldly pleasures. Immortality in heaven is their chief goal.

When Hani goes to the psychiatrist — who he thought by her ambiguous name was a man — he asks her to put on a headscarf during their sessions. She refuses, and throughout their talk, he can’t look at her. When she asks him the last thing that made him feel alive, his response comes from Salafi doctrine: “I bought my shroud and wrote my will.” He occasionally sleeps under his bed, convinced that it is the closest thing to being inside a grave, thus a reminder of his mortality.

But Jackson’s death revives in Hani the obsession with the singer he had in his teens, when he imitated the star’s look and dance moves. It earned him the nickname “Jackson,” but also the disapproval of his macho father.

“He is effeminate,” the father says of Jackson. But Hani’s mother whispers to him, “He is the world’s best singer. But keep that as our little secret.” When the mother dies young, Hani’s father turns into a serial womanizer and becomes violent, beating Hani for imitating his idol.

When the adult Hani discovers his own daughter — around six or seven — watching videos of Beyonce, he tears out the Wifi and denounces “dancing to the devil’s tune.”

The film, which is to be released in Egyptian cinemas later this month and which Egypt has put forward as a candidate for a best foreign film Oscar nomination, goes into delicate territory.

Source: Worlds of Islam, Michael Jackson collide in Egyptian film | Fox News

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