Malmö: The Swedish city where Syrian refugees and hipsters have bonded over food | The Independent

2017/08/26 Leave a comment

A good integration news story from Malmo for a change:

The main square of Malmö’s alternative Möllevången district bursts with colour on Saturdays. The open-air market is in full force; fulsome purple aubergines are stacked proudly next to emerald fronds of coriander and stallholders complain about the weather with friends in foreign tongues. This cosmopolitan corner of Malmö has transformed in recent years from a working class area to a radically multicultural district, where hipsters and refugees rub shoulders. It’s also a hub for some of the most authentic Syrian food outside of Syria.

In 2015, at the peak of the crisis in Syria, Sweden took in more Syrian refugees per capita than any other European country. Of the 163,000 refugees who arrived there in 2015, 32,000 were granted asylum and many of those chose to come to Malmö, where there was already a growing Middle Eastern population.

Shamiat was the first Syrian restaurant in Malmö, founded on 1 October 2013. I visit the branch in Bergsgatan, five minutes from the square. Inside, owner Maurice Salloum twirls the ends of his handlebar moustache ruminatively as his staff lay out a feast of mezze. Salloum arrived in Malmö in 2012, at the start of the civil war, and it took him 18 days to get to Sweden from his home in Damascus. Last year Shamiat was named best Middle Eastern restaurant by a local newspaper. It was the cementing of Salloum’s place in this new city.

“I was feeling fantastic,” he says. “I was very happy and proud that the Swedish people have accepted me to be here in this country”. But he still worries that not all Swedes have accepted the migrant population. There was a terrorist attack in Stockholm in April, perpetrated by a rejected asylum seeker from Uzbekistan who announced his sympathy with Isis. “This made me very sad,” says Salloum, “I baked bread that day and went out there to give the bread away for free.”

Salloum decided to open his restaurant because he saw a gap in the market. The name of the restaurant means “Damascene,” and is also a name for a dish which is only found in Damascus.

“Before we came, there was no Damascene food available in Malmö, so we work hard to give customers something special and unique,” he adds.

I try the fattoush, a salad of roughly chopped leaves, pepper wedges, olives and fried flatbread, drenched in pomegranate syrup. “It’s a very nice, typical dish, a bit like tabbouleh,” says Salloum. It is sharp and sweet and rustic – and nothing like tabbouleh.

The trend for Middle Eastern cuisine was first brought to Malmö by Lebanese and Turkish immigrants, who created the foundations of a food scene that, in turn, helped the Syrian restaurants to flourish here.

Down the road on Baltzarsgatan 21 is Laziza, a modern Lebanese restaurant whose bountiful buffet food attracts 300 customers a day. The owner, Sadoo Iskandarani, says his grandfather opened up the very first falafel place in Malmö.

“He was my idol,” he says. “He was good with bread and falafel. In the Nineties he started a cart selling falafel in Helsingborg and people loved it. The teachers came to eat there and the police officers came, then maybe 20 bikers would come and stand in line, queuing for falafel.

“I think Malmö has the best of all the cultures that live here and that food is building the bridges between the cultures.”

The most recent addition to Malmö’s Syrian restaurant scene is Ayam Dimashq, which roughly translates as “Days of our life in Damascus”. It’s north of Möllevången, on the borders of the Varnhem and Carolikvarteren districts, on Östra Förstadsgatan.

Chef-owner Huni Awwad opened it just nine months ago. He came to Sweden four years ago, when he was 39. Unlike many of the younger men who move to Sweden from Syria, Huni was already well-established with his own large, successful restaurant back in Damascus, called Peacebird.

Ayam is beautifully designed, with a modern, geometric logo and tapestries depicting landmarks and streets in Damascus, with small details picked out in gold thread.

“Everything’s coming together fast here,” says Huni. “In my country everything is a little bit slower, but I come here, open a restaurant, get married and have a boy – and I have another boy on the way – all in four years!”

He came here by boat; it took him five attempts.

“I don’t know why I made it on the fifth attempt but I thought to myself, ‘I can’t turn back this time. I might die, but I can’t turn back. ’Luckily I am here, so it’s good.”

His fattah is a warm blend of pureed chickpeas, yoghurt and sesame, with soft pieces of flatbread melting underneath. It’s topped with toasted cashews, pomegranate seeds, fried strips of flatbread, pine nuts and sprinkled with sumac. The flavours are beautiful.

Awwad’s life seems to have fallen into place here, but the move from Syria was a necessity, not a choice. He works a long day; it’s Ramadan and Midsummer, so he’ll stay open until 4am for his Muslim customers to break their fast.

“It is very hard when you change your whole life,” he says. “It is a good life here, very good, people are very nice and I think my life here resembles my life in Damascus – but it is not my life. My heart is in Damascus.” He looks up at the wall-hanging depicting a winding cobbled street lined with ancient buildings. “I hope one day to walk these streets again, and taste the food of home.”

Source: Malmö: The Swedish city where Syrian refugees and hipsters have bonded over food | The Independent

Filed under Multiculturalism, Refugees Tagged with ,

ICYMI – Inheritance rules ‘definative’ in Islam: Al-Azhar grand sheikh – Egypt Independent

2017/08/26 Leave a comment

Sigh….

Al-Azhar Grand Sheikh, Ahmed al-Tayyeb, stressed that the “inheritance rules” in Islam are clear and “definitive”, rejecting the Tunisian president’s call for equality between men and women in regards to inheritance.

Tayyeb added in a statement Sunday that, inheritance is regulated in the Quran by clear and definitive verses that leave no room for interpretation, unlike other verses that could be interpreted by scholars in more than one way,

He added that such rulings cannot be allowed, as they are not based in the study of Sharia or Islamic scriptures, pointing out that such ideas provoke the Muslim masses and could lead to destabilization in Muslim societies.

Tayyeb stated he firmly rejects political interference with the set rules of Islamic Sharia.

Al-Azhar declared its position on the equality between men and women in inheritance based on the religious responsibility it has held for more than a thousand years, and to make clear the rules of Islamic Sharia to the Islamic nation around the world, Tayyeb said in a statement on Sunday.

The sheikh went on to say that the institution guards the rules of Islam around the world regardless of geographic borders or political orientations.

Source: Inheritance rules ‘definative’ in Islam: Al-Azhar grand sheikh – Egypt Independent

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White privilege, Jewish privilege, and neo-Nazis: Cohn 

2017/08/25 Leave a comment

A thoughtful exploration of the different forms of privilege, and the complexities involved by Martin Regg Cohn.

Money quote: “prejudice and privilege come in all shades and colours.”

The latest manifestations of white supremacy have reminded us that Jews, not just Blacks, are perennial targets at neo-Nazi rallies.

Put another way, African Americans and Ashkenazi Americans are seen as equally un-American by the blue-eyed, red-blooded, all-American white nationalists who chanted in Charlottesville, “Jews will not replace us.”

That shared demonization comes as no surprise to many Jews who know their history. And who have watched with apprehension the present-day tendency to lash out at so many other “others” — be they brown, Black, Indigenous or Muslim.

But the resurgence of anti-Semitism is also an awkward reminder that “white privilege,” supposedly enjoyed by white Jews and all other white folks, offers little protection from persecution or privation. Now, as the casual invocation of white privilege gains greater currency, it’s worth examining some of the questionable assumptions that underpin it — and undermine it.

This is not an attempt to shoot down the important social analysis behind the theory of “white privilege” — the idea that most whites have “unearned” advantages notably in dealing with the police, employment and education. But relying on colour to confer privilege on people — an entire class of people — is conflating, confusing and counterproductive.

When a phrase risks alienating potential allies in the quest for greater equality of opportunity, it’s time for better terminology. Much like “cultural appropriation,” the “white privilege” paradigm emerged from the academic world, which speaks in its own rarefied and coded jargon, often obscuring rather than clarifying real-world issues. Beyond the ivory tower, where colour analysis has superseded class analysis, the term “white privilege” is being used, misused and misunderstood.

I hope I have a head start in understanding the obstacles others face. My grandparents didn’t just face discrimination but death in the 1940s. I still have a Montreal Gazette clipping about the landlord who wouldn’t rent to my father in the 1950s because of our Jewish surname (which made the stories about Donald Trump’s father rejecting Black tenants personal for me).

Privilege is part of any society that stratifies itself along various lines — hierarchical, patriarchal, economical, geographical, political, religious. But when “white privilege” is appropriated as a proxy for societal unfairness, it too easily breeds resentment.

It is a classic anti-Semitic trope to confer privilege and power on Jews — propagating the pre-Nazi, Nazi and neo-Nazi fiction that they control the media, the banks, the world (you might call it fake news . . .). We are not reliving the 1930s today, but whether in Hitler’s Germany or Trump’s America, the privileged can be persecuted in the blink of an eye.

And not just Jews. Citizens of Japanese descent were unjustly incarcerated in Canada and the U.S. in the Second World War for fear they were fascist fifth columnists. Today, students of Asian descent are viewed skeptically for their disproportionate university enrolment. Talk of informal “Asian quotas” among college admissions officers has personal resonance given the formal Jewish quotas enforced at major universities in the 1950s.

Beware white privilege, for class and cultural differences are no less critical.

It is one of the great conceits of whites that we flagellate ourselves as the world’s most unrepentant racists. Go to Indonesia, where the majority has hounded an ethnic Chinese minority for decades as a “privileged” group of shopkeepers. Think of Vietnam, where so many boat people were ethnic Chinese fleeing persecution. Consider Hong Kong, where those of Indian descent are disparaged and whites are mocked as “gweilos” (ghosts). In East Africa, Ismailis of South Asia origin have been persecuted for decades. Entrenched homophobia across Africa conjures up Black heterosexual privilege. India’s caste system has long co-existed with a colour continuum that prompts marriage prospects to describe themselves as having “wheatish” complexions, as against less socially desirable “dusky.”

The reality everywhere is that race and skin colour are clumsy proxies for social distinctions that matter at least as much: Ageism is a chronic affliction. The urban-rural in Ontario and across North America is deeply rooted. Postsecondary education is ever more accessible, yet driving more enduring disparities for those left behind.

Yes, we need constant reminders of our blind spots, but white privilege is hardly the clearest prism for viewing the world. Whites assuredly have advantages — on average. But averages are just generalizations, which lend themselves to stereotypes, which can be skin deep. Averages disguise the individual variations underneath.

We live in a world of competing victimhoods. But if everyone plays victim — even the billionaire President Donald Trump and the white nationalists he flirts with — then no one is a victim.

When white Jews are targeted by so-called white nationalists, the notion of white privilege loses its colour palette. But it reminds everyone — not least Jews who joined the civil rights battles of the 1960s, in the wake of the Holocaust of the 1940s — that we must all stick together, even if we come at it from different life experiences.

Which is why we need a better term than white privilege. Because prejudice and privilege come in all shades and colours.

Source: White privilege, Jewish privilege, and neo-Nazis: Cohn | Toronto Star

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Do minorities prefer ads with white people?

2017/08/25 Leave a comment

Interesting study, one that suggests biases are common to many groups, with the wrinkle that ‘prompts’ of compassion appear to attenuate the effects:

The marketplace is becoming more inclusive than ever. Today, advertisements that include models from ethnic minorities are commonplace. That wasn’t the norm a few decades ago.

Academic and market research show that ethnic minority consumers like advertisements that include their own ethnic group. They also appreciate brands that use such advertising.

However, research has overlooked how ethnic minority consumers evaluate advertising that feature members of other ethnic minorities.

In a forthcoming paper in the International Journal of Research in Marketing, our team of marketing experts at three Canadian universities reports a backlash effect. Ethnic minority consumers feel more ostracized by advertisements featuring models who belong to other ethnic minority groups than they do when they see ads with white models. And that leads to a less favourable attitude toward those advertisements.

In North America, white models advertising a variety of products has been the norm for decades. We argue that when advertisers include ethnic minority models, racially diverse consumers take notice.

But if the models are not from their own ethnic group, they may wonder why the advertisers chose models of another race or culture. They question why their own ethnicity is not represented.

We conducted five experimental studies with American and Canadian participants belonging to different ethnic minority groups. Participants consistently reported more positive attitudes towards advertisements that featured white models. They felt ostracized by the advertisements featuring members of other ethnic minorities.

This backlash was especially true for participants whose membership in their own ethnic group was important to them. It was strongest for participants with so-called high social-dominance orientation, a personality trait indicative of political conservatism.

Advertisements that feature multiple models of different ethnicities suffer from the backlash too.

In one study, Asian and Latino American participants were shown a bank advertisement that included models from several ethnic backgrounds. For half of the participants, the advertisement included a person belonging to their own ethnicity. For the other half, the advertisement excluded models belonging to their own ethnicity.

Participants who saw the advertisement that featured a model of their own ethnic group evaluated the advertisement more positively than those who did not see their ethnic group represented.

Portrayals of compassion change ad perceptions

We also found that advertisements that promote thoughts of compassion do not face the same backlash as other advertisements. In one study, ethnic minority participants who viewed an advertisement featuring another ethnic minority showed higher preference for the advertisement when it included words like sympathetic, gentle and forgiving than when it did not include such words.

In general, compassion increases our perceived similarity to others. And so advertisements highlighting compassion make us more likely to see people as similar to us regardless of their ethnicity.

Our takeaway from this research is that ethnic minority consumers do not see themselves as one large minority group. They take note of which ethnicity is represented in advertisements, and may not appreciate advertisers who consistently overlook theirs.

We encourage advertisers to be inclusive, because ads featuring ethnic minorities are received positively by those groups that are included. Advertisers should also aim to be thoughtful when it comes to which ethnic groups they highlight in their advertising.

Source: Do minorities prefer ads with white people?

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Chris Selley: Astonishing nonsense from the Liberals amid surge of asylum-seekers

2017/08/25 2 Comments

Good column by Selley. Love the first para on the party differences.

His recommendation for more resources to speed up the determination process makes sense as the best feedback loop to discourage border crossings are quick determinations and removals as warranted:

When Conservative Canadian governments deport failed asylum-seekers and try to prevent them from arriving in the first place, they tend to boast about it. When Liberal Canadian governments deport failed asylum-seekers and try to prevent them from arriving in the first place, they tend to pretend it’s simply not happening. On migration policy, this is one of the key differences between our two natural governing parties. It basically boils down to branding.

The Trudeau government has taken traditional Liberal messaging considerably further, though. In March, amidst a global refugee crisis, having recently dropped the tourist visa requirement for Mexican citizens and with a surge of northbound border-crossers arriving concurrently (if not because of) the Trump presidency — and with hundreds of thousands of undocumented people in the U.S. who could theoretically join that surge — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted out this now-legendary piece of reckless, insincere nonsense: “Regardless of who you are or where you come from, there’s always a place for you in Canada.”

Spoiler alert: there isn’t.

In a press conference on Wednesday, Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel tried to frame the northbound exodus as a direct result of Trudeau’s shameless virtue signalling. Asked what her government had done or would do differently, she responded, essentially, that her government wouldn’t have all-but-explicitly encouraged people to give Canada a college try.

It’s a stretch; this is mostly about circumstances beyond any government’s control. But the extent to which this government refuses to speak in plain English is truly remarkable.

On Sunday, in a visit to the border region in Quebec, Transport Minister Marc Garneau said Canadian consulates in the U.S. would try to warn people thinking of heading north to claim asylum that their chances of success were far from assured. That’s a very good idea. Many of the current border-crossers are Haitians whose asylum claims failed in the United States. A temporary post-earthquake moratorium on removals having expired, they now face deportation. Reports suggest they are being sold garbage advice — in some cases literally — that Canada is a sure thing. To preserve Canada’s already stretched border resources, to maintain whatever public trust remains in the system’s integrity, and to save vulnerable people from extortion and financial ruin, the government should be warning people away in no uncertain terms.

Here’s what Garneau put on Twitter: “We are continuing to engage with diaspora communities in the U.S.A. — everyone deserves to know the facts about what it means to come to Canada.”

And on Wednesday, here’s what Trudeau put on Twitter: “We’re … reaching out to folks in the U.S. to make sure people who want to come to Canada understand the proper procedures to do so.”

For the love of God, man, there is no “proper procedure” with a snowball’s chance in Port-au-Prince via which a failed Haitian asylum-seeker in the United States can come “properly” to Canada. What you mean is “don’t come. We’ll probably deport you anyway.” So say it.

There’s no guarantee a blunt message would get the job done, mind you. No matter how often the Conservatives called asylum-seekers from European Union countries “bogus refugees,” the Immigration and Refugee Board kept recognizing their claims at a reasonable clip — 2,500 from Hungary alone over the last decade, for a roughly 18 per cent success rate.

Unlike Hungary, the now-famous unofficial border crossing in Quebec is just a Greyhound and a cab away from anywhere in the contiguous 48 states. If Canada’s consulates are indeed distributing “the facts,” then Haitians will know Canada has accepted nearly 50 per cent of claims from their fellow citizens over the last 10 years. Many claims that failed in the U.S. might well fail in Canada too — but it’s a safe bet quite a few would succeed. (The U.S. accepts a significantly lower percentage of claimants.)

If my options were (a) deportation to Haiti, where I have nothing, or (b) a $200 trip to the border, a longish stay in Canada during which I can legally work and make some money, a long-shot chance at permanent residency and then, at worst, deportation to Haiti anyway, I know exactly which one I would pick.

What can the government do about this? Without straying dramatically from traditional policy options, not a hell of a lot. But it could stray from traditional Liberal policy and not let a massive backlog build up. On Wednesday, citing a UNHCR official, Global News reported asylum-seekers arriving today won’t even get preliminary eligibility hearings until January. The longer a hopeless claim takes to be resolved, the greater the incentive to give it a whirl. The government could hire more people to deal with these claimants expeditiously, which the Liberals have said they will, thus reducing that incentive. But most radically, as off-brand as it would be, the Liberals might consider saying what they bloody well mean.

Source: National Post

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Rabbis ditch High Holy Days call with Trump – POLITICO

2017/08/25 Leave a comment

As Andrew Cohen recently argued, Trump’s Jewish advisers should stand up to him. Rabbis message should provoke reflection. As for the evangelical leaders still supporting Trump (the only council yet to have lost members or disbanded?), some signs of weakening support (Evangelicals Losing Faith in Trump After Racist Ranting):

A prominent coalition of American rabbis has decided not to hold its annual conference call with the president to mark Jewish holidays, citing Donald Trump’s remarks on the recent violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, as supporting “those who advocate anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia.”

“We have concluded that President Trump’s statements during and after the tragic events in Charlottesville are so lacking in moral leadership and empathy for the victims of racial and religious hatred that we cannot organize such a call this year,” the groups — the Central Conference of American Rabbis, Rabbinical Assembly, Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association and Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism — said in a statement.

The coalition represents the leaders of much of the U.S. Jewish community, with the exception of Orthodox Jews, who have been much more supportive of Trump. His daughter Ivanka and her family are Orthodox Jews. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

The call, which is organized by the Reform rabbis group CCAR, is a standard event for presidents each year. Rabbi Steve Fox, CCAR’s executive director, said former President Barack Obama participated in each year of his administration.

“These are religious issues, not political issues. It is important that the president steps forward as a moral leader on these issues,” Fox said in an interview. “As the leader of the U.S. and the leader of the free world, we believe it is his obligation to condemn these white supremacists.”

Fox said Trump’s response to the Charlottesville unrest — among other comments, the president said there were “very fine people” amid a crowd of white supremacists and neo-Nazis protesting in defense of a Confederate statue — put the celebration of the Jewish High Holy Days at risk.

“We pray that President Trump will recognize and remedy the grave error he has made in abetting the voices of hatred,” the group said. “We pray that those who traffic in anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia will see that there is no place for such pernicious philosophies in a civilized society.”

Trump has faced a barrage of criticism since the Charlottesville white supremacist rally that left one person dead. Trump has defended his response that “many sides” are to blame for the violence that ensued. At a campaign rally in Phoenix on Tuesday, the president accused the media of misrepresenting his response and read parts of his initial remarks, though he omitted the controversial language that seemingly placed blame on counter-protesters.

Most members on Trump’s evangelical council, meanwhile, have not distanced themselves from the president. A.R. Bernard, who once a member of the Evangelical Advisory Board, said on Friday that he resigned due to a “deepening conflict in values” between himself and the Trump administration.

Source: Rabbis ditch High Holy Days call with Trump – POLITICO

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

Myanmar: Annan report calls for review of 1982 Citizenship Law 

2017/08/25 Leave a comment

Ongoing issue, one that reflects poorly on Myanmar:

An advisory commission tasked with finding sustainable solutions in Rakhine State has submitted its final report to the government, where it called for freedom of movement for all people in Rakhine and a review of the controversial 1982 Citizenship Law.

The Advisory Commission on Rakhine State, headed by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, was formed by State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in September 2016. It was formed by the October 9 attacks in northern Rakhine State, which led to a military crackdown that has come with allegations of human rights violations.

An estimated 1.1 million Muslims – many who identify as Rohingya, a term the government rejects – are denied access to citizenship in line with the citizenship law, which was enacted by former dictator U Ne Win. The law does not recognise the Rohingya as one of the country’s 135 recognised ethnic groups.

The commission’s report, released on Thursday, urged the government to bring the law in line with international standards and abolish “different distinctions between different types of citizens”. The law currently recognises full citizens, associate citizens and naturalised citizens.

The report also urged the commission to begin a process to review the citizenship law “to ensure the equitable treatment of all citizens”.

Many of the Rohingya in the state face severe restrictions on movements, and while the commission acknowledged recent efforts by the government to improve freedom of movement in the north of the state, it said it had only effected those holding the correct identification.

“To have greater impact, freedom of movement should be delinked from the citizenship verification process, meaning that all individuals in Rakhine State should be able to move freely irrespective of whether they hold an NVC [National Verification Card], NRC card [National Registration Card] or citizenship documentation, consistent with the basic right of all people to free movement,” the report said.

An estimated 120,000 Muslims are confined to IDP camps in Rakhine, many without access to basic livelihoods such as education, healthcare and livelihoods. The report said that efforts to allow the return of people home has “shown little progress”, and called on the government to develop a “comprehensive strategy towards closing all IDP camps” in the state.

It said the process should be developed through consultation with affected communities and should have clear timelines, adding that all returns and relocations must be voluntary and should allow people to return to their place of origin as a priority.

In the interim, it suggested improving shelter, water, sanitation and livelihoods in the IDP camps.

In northern Rakhine State, humanitarian and media access has largely been cut off since the October attacks, and the commission urged the government to ensure full and regular access to all parts of the state.

The military has been accused of using disproportionate force in its operations, including allegations of mass rape, extrajudicial killing and torture. The government and military have continuously denied all charges.

In March, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution to form an investigation team to probe rights abuses in Myanmar, with a particular focus on Rakhine. However, the Myanmar government has denied visas to its members.

The commission called for an “independent and impartial investigation” into the facts on the ground in order to ensure that those who conducted violations are held accountable.

Additionally, the commission called on the government form a ministry tasked solely with implementing its recommendations. It said the appointment should inintially be a one-year appointment and deliver public quarterly reports.

“The secretariat’s staff should be in permanent consultation with groups in Rakhine State in the implementation of its work,” the commission said.

Source: Annan report calls for review of 1982 Citizenship Law | Frontier Myanmar

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A Hunt for Ways to Combat Online Radicalization – The New York Times

2017/08/24 Leave a comment

Interesting approach, applicable to extremists and radicals, whether on right, left or other:

Law enforcement officials, technology companies and lawmakers have long tried to limit what they call the “radicalization” of young people over the internet.

The term has often been used to describe a specific kind of radicalization — that of young Muslim men who are inspired to take violent action by the online messages of Islamist groups like the Islamic State. But as it turns out, it isn’t just violent jihadists who benefit from the internet’s power to radicalize young people from afar.

White supremacists are just as adept at it. Where the pre-internet Ku Klux Klan grew primarily from personal connections and word of mouth, today’s white supremacist groups have figured out a way to expertly use the internet to recruit and coordinate among a huge pool of potential racists. That became clear two weeks ago with the riots in Charlottesville, Va., which became a kind of watershed event for internet-addled racists.

“It was very important for them to coordinate and become visible in public space,” said Joan Donovan, a scholar of media manipulation and right-wing extremism at Data & Society, an online research institute. “This was an attempt to say, ‘Let’s come out; let’s meet each other. Let’s build camaraderie, and let’s show people who we are.’”

Ms. Donovan and others who study how the internet shapes extremism said that even though Islamists and white nationalists have different views and motivations, there are broad similarities in how the two operate online — including how they spread their message, recruit and organize offline actions. The similarities suggest a kind of blueprint for a response — efforts that may work for limiting the reach of jihadists may also work for white supremacists, and vice versa.

In fact, that’s the battle plan. Several research groups in the United States and Europe now see the white supremacist and jihadi threats as two faces of the same coin. They’re working on methods to fight both, together — and slowly, they have come up with ideas for limiting how these groups recruit new members to their cause.

Their ideas are grounded in a few truths about how extremist groups operate online, and how potential recruits respond. After speaking to many researchers, I compiled this rough guide for combating online radicalization.

Recognize the internet as an extremist breeding ground.

The first step in combating online extremism is kind of obvious: It is to recognize the extremists as a threat.

For the Islamic State, that began to happen in the last few years. After a string of attacks in Europe and the United States by people who had been indoctrinated in the swamp of online extremism, politicians demanded action. In response, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other online giants began identifying extremist content and systematically removing it from their services, and have since escalated their efforts.

When it comes to fighting white supremacists, though, much of the tech industry has long been on the sidelines. This laxity has helped create a monster. In many ways, researchers said, white supremacists are even more sophisticated than jihadists in their use of the internet.

The earliest white nationalist sites date back to the founding era of the web. For instance, Stormfront.org, a pioneering hate site, was started as a bulletin board in 1990. White supremacist groups have also been proficient at spreading their messages using the memes, language and style that pervade internet subcultures. Beyond setting up sites of their own, they have more recently managed to spread their ideology to online groups that were once largely apolitical, like gaming and sci-fi groups.

And they’ve grown huge. “The white nationalist scene online in America is phenomenally larger than the jihadists’ audience, which tends to operate under the radar,” said Vidhya Ramalingam, the co-founder of Moonshot CVE, a London-based start-up that works with internet companies to combat violent extremism. “It’s just a stunning difference between the audience size.”

After the horror of Charlottesville, internet companies began banning and blocking content posted by right-wing extremist groups. So far their efforts have been hasty and reactive, but Ms. Ramalingam sees it as at the start of a wider effort.

“It’s really an unprecedented moment where social media and tech companies are recognizing that their platforms have become spaces where these groups can grow, and have been often unpoliced,” she said. “They’re really kind of waking up to this and taking some action.”

Engage directly with potential recruits.

If tech companies are finally taking action to prevent radicalization, is it the right kind of action? Extremism researchers said that blocking certain content may work to temporarily disrupt groups, but may eventually drive them further underground, far from the reach of potential saviors.

A more lasting plan involves directly intervening in the process of radicalization. Consider The Redirect Method, an anti-extremism project created by Jigsaw, a think tank founded by Google. The plan began with intensive field research. After interviews with many former jihadists, white supremacists and other violent extremists, Jigsaw discovered several important personality traits that may abet radicalization.

One factor is a skepticism of mainstream media. Whether on the far right or ISIS, people who are susceptible to extremist ideologies tend to dismiss outlets like The New York Times or the BBC, and they often go in search of alternative theories online.

Another key issue is timing. There’s a brief window between initial interest in an extremist ideology and a decision to join the cause — and after recruits make that decision, they are often beyond the reach of outsiders. For instance, Jigsaw found that when jihadists began planning their trips to Syria to join ISIS, they had fallen too far down the rabbit hole and dismissed any new information presented to them.

Jigsaw put these findings to use in an innovative way. It curated a series of videos showing what life is truly like under the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. The videos, which weren’t filmed by news outlets, offered a credible counterpoint to the fantasies peddled by the group — they show people queuing up for bread, fighters brutally punishing civilians, and women and children being mistreated.

Experiencing the Caliphate Video by Upvotely

Then, to make sure potential recruits saw the videos at the right time in their recruitment process, Jigsaw used one of Google’s most effective technologies: ad targeting. In the same way that a pair of shoes you looked up last week follows you around the internet, Jigsaw’s counterterrorism videos were pushed to likely recruits.

Jigsaw can’t say for sure if the project worked, but it found that people spent lots of time watching the videos, which suggested they were of great interest, and perhaps dissuaded some from extremism.

Moonshot CVE, which worked with Jigsaw on the Redirect project, put together several similar efforts to engage with both jihadists and white supremacist groups. It has embedded undercover social workers in extremist forums who discreetly message potential recruits to dissuade them. And lately it’s been using targeted ads to offer mental health counseling to those who might be radicalized.

“We’ve seen that it’s really effective to go beyond ideology,” Ms. Ramalingam said. “When you offer them some information about their lives, they’re disproportionately likely to interact with it.”

What happens online isn’t all that matters in the process of radicalization. The offline world obviously matters too. Dylann Roof — the white supremacist who murdered nine people at a historically African-American church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 — was radicalized online. But as a new profile in GQ Magazine makes clear, there was much more to his crime than the internet, including his mental state and a racist upbringing.

Still, just about every hate crime and terrorist attack, these days, was planned or in some way coordinated online. Ridding the world of all of the factors that drive young men to commit heinous acts isn’t possible. But disrupting the online radicalization machine? With enough work, that may just be possible.

Filed under Radicalization, Social Media Tagged with ,

Canadian citizenship grant upheld for immigrant doctor living in the U.S.

2017/08/24 Leave a comment

Interesting case, under pre-C-24 rules before residency was more tightly defined as requiring physical presence. While C-6 reduces the residency time requirements, it rightly maintains the physical presence definition:

An immigrant doctor doing medical training in the United States can keep his Canadian citizenship even though he had spent far fewer days in Canada than normally required to become a citizen, Federal Court has ruled.

In rejecting an appeal from the federal government, Judge Susan Elliott found no reason to undo an earlier decision to allow Irfan Saddique to become a Canadian.

Court records show Saddique declared only 177 days of physical presence in Canada when he applied to become a citizen, well short of the required 1,095 days. Normally, that would have disqualified his application.

However, Saddique argued successfully before a citizenship judge in January that he had been forced to move to the U.S. for his medical residency so he could earn the credentials he needed to work as a doctor in Canada.

After examining the case, the citizenship judge found that Saddique had maintained his “centralized mode” of living in Canada and allowed him to become a Canadian.

The minister of citizenship and immigration appealed to Federal Court, arguing the judge’s decision was unreasonable.

Among other things, the government faulted the judge for failing to analyze whether Saddique had already established residence in Canada before he left for the United States to continue his training, and said the evidence he provided about his ties to Canada was inadequate.

“As I understand the minister’s position, it is akin to an adequacy-of-reasons argument and, despite protestations to the contrary, there are elements of asking the court to reweigh the evidence,” Elliott said in her ruling. “By reason of their special knowledge and expertise, citizenship judges are owed a degree of deference in the application of the test they choose and the assessment of the evidence placed before them.”

Saddique, who is from Pakistan, in turn argued the judge had considered his circumstances carefully, and correctly applied the legal test for residency.

He maintained he would have preferred to do his medical residency in Canada but had been unable to obtain a position, and therefore had no choice but to go to the United States.

He said he had as many as 50 relatives in Ontario, including a Canadian wife, maintained a home in Brampton, Ont., and planned to live permanently in Canada as soon as his medical-licensing process was done.

In siding with him, Elliott said the citizenship judge had taken into account several factors in determining Saddique’s residency, including that he had tried for a medical position in Canada, had maintained strong family ties in this country, and returned whenever he could.

As such, the judge who saw and heard Saddique applied the facts to the law, using the expertise she had gained, Elliott said.

“I am satisfied that the decision is intelligible and transparent,” Elliott ruled. “The outcome is supported by the evidence in the record. It is defensible on the facts and law.”

Source: Canadian citizenship grant upheld for immigrant doctor living in the U.S. | rdnewsNOW

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Refugee approval rates reflect subjectivity of decision-makers, prof says

2017/08/24 Leave a comment

Rehaag does good serious analysis, demonstrating the challenge of ensuring consistency among a diverse group of decision-makers. The replacement of political appointees by public servants appears to have reduced somewhat the previously wide variation among decision-makers:

The rate at which refugee claims are accepted by Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board varies widely depending on who hears the case, according to a professor who obtained data from the federal government.

Sean Rehaag is an associate professor at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Toronto, who specializes in immigration and refugee law and human rights. Through an access to information request, he was able to obtain IRB decisions for refugee claims filed in 2016.

‘Some board members are just more likely to believe claimants than other board members.’ – Sean Rehaag, university professor

He found a wide variability in acceptance rates, from as low as a quarter of cases heard to a high of 96 per cent.

“I do think that who we appoint as decision-makers really matters,” said Rehaag, specifying it is important to “appoint people who have a solid understanding of refugee law and who are not predisposed to denying claims.”

Rehaag’s work may provide insight into how the 7,000 asylum seekers who have crossed the border on foot at Roxham Road in Hemmingford, Que., will be handled over the next few months as they begin to appear in front of the IRB to test their refugee claims.

Some of that variability in deciding cases is due to the fact that different board members can specialize in different regions of the world.

“It makes perfect sense that if you are mostly hearing cases today from, let’s say, Syria, you are going to have a much higher grant rate than if you were mostly hearing cases from Western European countries, because Syria is much less safe,” said Rehaag.

But even when specializations are taken into account, said Rehaag, there’s still a lot of variation.

“My view is that the variation that remains reflects subjectivity in decision-making,” he said.

Variance to be expected, IRB says

In a statement, IRB spokesperson Line-Alice Guibert-Wolff said variance in acceptance rates from one member to another is to be expected.

“Members render decisions based on the evidence and argumentation presented (or not presented) and each refugee protection claim is unique, and must be determined on its individual merit,” she wrote, adding that there are many factors that impact a decision.

While consistency in its decision-making is the goal, Guibert-Wolff said that, in a quasi-judicial setting where each case is determined on its own merits, based on the evidence presented, consistency is not always possible.

However, the variance in acceptance rates is subject to a periodic review.

New system better than old one

The process for people seeking asylum in Canada changed in 2012, affecting how cases were heard and who heard them. Under the old system, decision-makers were political appointees, but under the reformed system, the decision-makers are public servants who are appointed instead.

As a result, Rehaag noticed a change in how many cases are accepted.

“There used to be decision-makers who denied every single case that they heard over several years. Those were political appointees and that no longer happens,” he said. “There is still subjectivity in decision-making, but it’s not as bad as it was before.

“To me, though, the biggest challenge that the Immigration and Refugee Board is facing right now is a resourcing question,” said Rehaag.

Procedural protections

One way to change the variation rate is to create procedural protections, similar to the criminal justice system.

For example, many asylum seekers are denied access to appeal, which Rehaag said would never happen in a criminal law context.

In 2016, 33 per cent of appeals were granted, a rate Rehaag characterizes as “remarkably high.”

Some claimants, especially those who came to Canada through the United States, are denied access to appeal and are ineligible for automatic stays of removal pending judicial review at the Federal Court.

That means once they’ve gotten a negative decision, they are forced to leave Canada quickly.

IRB spokesperson Guibert-Wolff said the majority of refugee claimants can appeal to the refugee appeal division, except if they fall under a few categories listed.

He said the government must properly fund the IRB so that there are not only enough decision-makers, but administrators, managers and support staff for the system to work smoothly.

Source: Refugee approval rates reflect subjectivity of decision-makers, prof says – Montreal – CBC News

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