Muslims can live faith more fully within Canadian society, Imam says in book aimed at ‘ostracized’ youth

2014/09/02 Leave a comment

Imam Delic’s book on the advantages Canadian Muslims have and the need for an intellectual renaissance within Islam:

Anybody who tries to destroy this creativity, who tries to block it, who tries to demean it, definitely does not understand what God Almighty was asking us with the first word that was revealed in the Qu’ran, and that is ‘iqra’ [read]. The first word that was ever revealed to the Prophet, peace be upon him, was not ‘pray,’ or ‘believe.’ It was ‘read.’ And ‘read’ came as a command. Why? Because if we don’t read, we will not learn. And if we do not learn, we will not know. And if we do not know, we will not understand. And if we do not understand, we will not be able to apply. Make sense?” Mr. Delic said. “Knowledge that does not actualize itself in positive action or ethical action is knowledge without base.”

The growth of Islam from the founding in Arabia through expansion as far as Moorish Spain suggests this intellectual command was once well understood, he said.

“At that time, when we stopped being intellectually challenged, or when we didn’t want to challenge ourselves, that creativity died out and that’s the reason why the Muslim community became stagnant, not progressive,” Mr. Delic said. “We need to re-read our historical texts in the context of modern times, modern societies, modern demands. I don’t want to take opinions of scholars from the 14th century that do not talk to my needs, my aspirations, even though I do respect them and their work for the time in which they lived. But their ideas do not apply to my time.”

In 2010, Defence Minister Peter MacKay cancelled a speech by Mr. Delic at an Islamic History Month event because he was then the new executive director of the Canadian Islamic Congress, which frequently indulged extremist views from 9/11 conspiracies to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Israel, and whose founder Mohamed Elmasry once made controversial comments about the Mideast conflict on a talk show that he later apologized for and retracted.

Mr. Delic’s speech was by no means extremist. It was, like his book, a call to active citizenship for Canadian Muslims, and a rejection of Islam’s orthodox, insular traditions.

The Government’s decision to disinvite him Imam Zijad Delic: The cancelled speech | Full Comment | National Post), as well as a narrow focus on relations with minority Muslim communities, created some challenges for the security agencies that recognized the role they could play in reducing risks of radicalization.

Muslims can live faith more fully within Canadian society, Imam says in book aimed at ‘ostracized’ youth

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Desperately Seeking Normalcy – Stem Cell Donors – New Canadian Media – NCM

2014/09/02 Leave a comment

These kinds of campaigns that personalize the issue are likely more effective than impersonal campaigns. And engaging the key communities is key to address the shortage.

As my experience attests, a stem cell transplant is no picnic with considerable risk, but does offer more time to those patients who can benefit from it:

“I think people are just so afraid of the process,” adds Nishaat. “They really feel like you’re taking something from them that cannot be replaced. When you look at minorities, even religiously speaking, the whole notion of organ donation is a major issue. So when it comes to bone marrow or stem cells, I think some of that falls into the same category. In terms of the mentality.”

The cultural stigma is so strong that some discourage their family from accepting donated organs even if a match is found. In one case, a Stanford professor had found a match for a South Asian couple’s 20-something son, but the young man’s parents convinced him at the last minute to refuse the donation.

South Asians 4 Life is one group partnering up with CBS in trying to combat the deep-rooted stigma through awareness campaigns. According to their website, 5,000 South Asians have registered with the OneMatch Stem Cell and Marrow Network. As of 2011, there were nearly 1.6 million South Asians living in Canada, the largest visible minority group in the country StatsCan. At the time of this article, 28 Canadian patients of South Asian descent were also reportedly waiting for a match.

“People actually have the opportunity to change the numbers,” says Munsif. “To make a positive impact. If they knew about it and if they thought or understood it could happen to their loved ones, they would have no hesitation to do it.”

Munsif says various community centres in the GTA have been “very supportive and extremely accommodating,” of their cause, by holding bone marrow donor drives more than two years ago in Nishaat’s name. From there he realized there were many misconceptions about signing up to be a donor.

Desperately Seeking Normalcy – New Canadian Media – NCM.

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StatsCan considering ‘virtual census’ to replace head count | Ottawa Citizen

2014/09/02 Leave a comment

Makes sense, in terms of efficiency and potentially accuracy (i.e., income data from tax forms may be more reliable than self-reporting).

Ironically, given that it is essentially a “big data” approach, it could be more intrusive than the former mandatory census that the Government abolished citing its intrusiveness (and not mentioning less than a handful of complaints).

Information sharing and privacy will be the harder policy issues.

But good that this is being considered:

A virtual census relies heavily on administrative data: giant caches of information collected by government in the regular course of business.

Statistics Canada already uses 500 databases drawn from federal, provincial and municipal governments, and the private sector. Among many other things, those data files provide information on individual incomes taxes, corporate taxes, payroll deductions, employment insurance, building permits, births and deaths, even telephone bills.

A handful of European countries — Finland, Holland, Sweden, Denmark and Germany — have scrapped their survey-based censuses in favour of population counts that rely heavily on an amalgam of administrative data. Sometimes, that data is combined with information from sample surveys.

“If you look around the world, particularly in Europe, you’ll see many countries have moved away from going out with a survey the way we do,” Smith told the Citizen.

“They’ve said there are data files available that we can use to effectively count the population: we don’t need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars and bother every household in the country to count the population.”

StatsCan considering ‘virtual census’ to replace head count | Ottawa Citizen.

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How StatsCan lost 42,000 jobs with the stroke of a key – Macleans.ca

2014/08/30 Leave a comment

Ouch. More a management than a technical issue, in terms of the lack of communication and risk analysis. And possibly partially a result of reduced capacity on the management and quality control side as a result of reduced funding:

Fast forward to July. StatsCan technicians were updating the Labour Force Survey computer systems. They were changing a field in the survey’s vast collection of databases called the “dwelling identification number.” The report doesn’t explain what this is, but it’s likely a unique code assigned to each of the 56,000 households in the survey so that analysts can easily track their answers over time. They assumed they only needed to make this change to some of the computer programs that crunch the employment data, but not all of them.

The changes themselves were happening piecemeal, rather than all at once, because the system that collects and analyzes the labour force survey is big, complicated and old it was first developed in 1997. Despite being a pretty major overhaul of the computer system, the report makes it clear that the agency considered the changes to be nothing but minor routine maintenance. After updating the system, no one bothered to test the changes to see if they had worked properly before the agency decided to release the data to the public, in large part because they considered it too minor to need testing.

One of the programs that was supposed to be updated — but wasn’t — was the program that fills in the blanks when people don’t answer all the survey questions. But since technicians had changed the identification code for households in some parts of the system, but not others, the program couldn’t match all the people in July survey to all the people in the June survey. The result was that instead of using the June survey results to update the July answers, all those households who didn’t answer the questions about being employed in July were essentially labelled as not in the labour force. With the push of a button, nearly 42,000 jobs disappeared.

… There is a particularly illuminating passage in the report that speaks to problems of miscommunication and misunderstanding at the agency:

“Based on the facts that we have gathered, we conclude that several factors contributed to the error in the July 2014 LFS results. There was an incomplete understanding of the LFS processing system on the part of the team implementing and testing the change to the TABS file. This change was perceived as systems maintenance and the oversight and governance were not commensurate with the potential risk. The systems documentation was out of date, inaccurate and erroneously supported the team’s assumptions about the system. The testing conducted was not sufficiently comprehensive and operations diagnostics to catch this type of error were not present. As well, roles and responsibilities within the team were not as clearly defined as they should have been. Communications among the team, labour analysts and senior management around this particular issue were inadequate.”

How StatsCan lost 42,000 jobs with the stroke of a key – Macleans.ca.

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The Spiral Of Silence – Social Media « The Dish

2014/08/30 Leave a comment

Another angle to how social media narrows discussion and debate:

It seems counter-intuitive–if we’re getting only what Facebook things we want to get based on everything they know about us, which is a lot, shouldn’t we assume we are always among friends? But it makes sense. We’re worried about losing friends, which is to say that we’re worried our number of friends will diminish.

What’s peculiar about the Pew study is how the questions were asked. Though the survey took place in the months after Snowden’s revelations, the subjects were asked will you and would you… not did you. Using the conditional to report on behavior that already might or might not have happened tends to make the whole exercise, well, an exercise.

It turns out, too, that the spiral of silence does not only extend to individuals. Take this week’s revelation about the NSA’s Google-like search engine that shares something on the order of 850 billion data points such as private emails obtained without a warrant from ordinary American citizens among numerous government agencies. This is a big deal for many reasons, not the least of which is that it may enable the FBI or the DEA to illegally obtain evidence and cover their tracks while so doing. Yet the mainstream media almost uniformly ignored the story. When I searched ICREACH today, only the online tech media had picked it up and run with it. Is it possible that the mainstream media is afraid of losing friends, too?

The Spiral Of Silence « The Dish.

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Gregory and Collin Gordon, Calgary brothers, join ranks of Canadians fighting for ISIS

2014/08/30 Leave a comment

The latest extremists from Calgary and again, no particular pattern as the brothers, born in Canada and converts to Islam, appeared to be well-adjusted and integrated. What made them change? And how did Calgary become a centre?:

“All I know about Collin is that he moved back home [to Calgary] and started to be hardcore Muslim,” said Akan Swisslizz Ekpenyong, a Vancouver-based hip hop artist who used to host parties with Collin in Kamloops and was his classmate.

Ekpenyong said it became increasingly difficult to communicate with Collin due to his religious beliefs — and that’s when he decided to “unfriend” him on Facebook. Ekpenyong had no idea how extreme Collin would eventually become.

No one CBC News spoke with can explain how exactly Collin went from sports, hip hop and tweets about wanting to marry American rapper Nicki Minaj in early 2012, to becoming one among thousands of foreign fighters trying to establish an Islamic state in the Middle East.

Heartbroken and confused, their parents told CBC News that they raised their children to be peaceful, kind and smart — and that both were well educated and never had any run-ins with the law.

Asking the media for privacy, the parents of the Gordon brothers provided the following statement to CBC News: “We would like all to know we love and miss our sons dearly. We are deeply concerned for their safety. At this time we refuse to speculate with regards to the end of their story. We continue to keep hope alive.”

And while their parents are keeping hope alive, Collin’s social media photos portray someone who has become well-adjusted to life as a foreign jihadi.

As Canadian-born, without dual citizenship, their citizenship could not be revoked unlike other members of the Calgary cell not-born in Canada.

Gregory and Collin Gordon, Calgary brothers, join ranks of Canadians fighting for ISIS – CBC News – Latest Canada, World, Entertainment and Business News.

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Werner Herzog on Creativity, Self-Reliance, Making a Living of What You Love, and How to Turn Your Ideas Into Reality

2014/08/30 Leave a comment

For film fans, and fans of Werner Herzog, a good selection of quotes from the book, A Guide for the Perplexed. My favourite on the creative process:

The problem isn’t coming up with ideas, it is how to contain the invasion. My ideas are like uninvited guests. They don’t knock on the door; they climb in through the windows like burglars who show up in the middle of the night and make a racket in the kitchen as they raid the fridge. I don’t sit and ponder which one I should deal with first. The one to be wrestled to the floor before all others is the one coming at me with the most vehemence. I have, over the years, developed methods to deal with the invaders as quickly and efficiently as possible, though the burglars never stop coming. You invite a handful of friends for dinner, but the door bursts open and a hundred people are pushing in. You might manage to get rid of them, but from around the corner another fifty appear almost immediately… Finishing a film is like having a great weight lifted from my shoulders. It’s relief, not necessarily happiness. But you relish dealing with these “burglars.” I am glad to be rid of them after making a film or writing a book. The ideas are uninvited guests, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t welcome.

Werner Herzog on Creativity, Self-Reliance, Making a Living of What You Love, and How to Turn Your Ideas Into Reality

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Art Initiative Explores The Imagined Space Where Islam Meets L.A.

2014/08/30 Leave a comment

Art as a means for encouraging understanding and contributing to conversation and dialogue:

“What I was interested in doing is deflecting this idea of a certain line of questioning or a certain representational show that is so often associated with a group show organized around identity matrixes,” Sahakian declared to HuffPost. “One thats organized over this overarching rubric of Islamic arts in terms of what people might expect artists to talk about. Instead of pretending there was any artwork that could answer these questions, I wanted to curate an exhibition that would do away with this line of questioning.”

Los Angeles, the site where so many normative, and often false, understandings of Islam are produced, was the perfect space for this exhibition to take place. “Los Angeles has been responsible for the ways much of the world views people from South Asia, North Africa, West Africa, and its diasporas. We understand that a lot of this is contributing to Islamophobia.”

Of course, there are also many more positive reasons to select Los Angeles. “L.A. is a ripe environment because these communities exist here; they’re part of the fabric. These discussions are happening in very natural ways around the city, but we want to formalize them and bring them to the surface. And explore the aesthetic aspects as well.”

Art Initiative Explores The Imagined Space Where Islam Meets L.A..

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Glavin: What’s so wrong with involving diasporas in foreign policy?

2014/08/29 1 Comment

Terry Glavin on diaspora politics:

Here’s the thing. Even if these claims are true, so what?

Parliament obtained full foreign-affairs sovereignty from Britain only with the passage of the Statute of Westminster in 1931. I can’t seem to find the codicil stipulating that foreign-policy jurisdiction was to be transferred only to wheezy Upper Canada diplocrats, yesteryear UN ambassadors, boring Middle Eastern Studies grad students and the twilight alumni of the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs.

Canada is a bustling multicultural democracy. One fifth of Canadians are foreign-born. With dozens of diaspora communities, Canada is blessed with an invaluable foreign-policy resource of experts, global networks, deep wells of human intelligence, and — heaven forbid — ballot-box moxy. Where better to turn for guidance and close consultation?

Three years ago, the Mosaic Institute and the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation undertook an in-depth analysis of the potential for Canada’s diaspora communities to more directly and usefully inform foreign policy. The government hasn’t paid it much attention, but what’s worth noticing here is that the authors of the “Tapping Our Potential” study straight away encountered a cynical old-guard view that the whole idea was a bad one to start with. There was a “general skepticism” in foreign-policy circles, “a view, in other words, that foreign policy is best left to the experts.”

Glavin, of course, cites the examples of diaspora politics he agrees with: Ukraine and Israel, but only makes a passing message to those he disagrees with (China).

Ethnic communities have a natural interest in events in their “homeland.” Canada, as a democracy, naturally responds to those interests, as it does to other interests as I argued in my take on diaspora politics (Shopping for Votes Can Undermine Canada’s Fine Balance).

But responding does not necessarily mean adopting wholesale the position of a particular community. This has to be balanced against other Canadian interests.

And what about diasporas that the Government or Canadians do not want to support? What is the criteria? The ideology of the Government of the day? The political strength of the community? The presence or absence of economic or other interests? Do we simply accept the leading community organizations as being fully representative of the community? And how do we balance – or should we – competing diaspora interests?

So, the question is not, as Glavin frames it as turning “away from the talents, insights and leadership in this country’s diaspora communities.” On the contrary, we can and should continue to listen and engage with them.

But the harder issue, which Glavin ignores, is how to balance these diaspora interests against other equally legitimate Canadian interests?

Glavin: What’s so wrong with involving diasporas in foreign policy? | Ottawa Citizen.

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Canadians in the dark about immigration numbers: survey

2014/08/29 Leave a comment

Not surprising that people don’t know the actual immigration figures. Common to many policy areas that most people don’t follow too closely and large numbers are fairly abstract in any case.

Government messaging walks the fine line between reassuring its base, and the broader public, that it is addressing fraud and the risk of over-dramatizing the extent of fraud (e.g., birth tourism) and thus contributing to reduced public confidence:

Ignorance of the facts, however, didn’t stop most of the 3,016 participants polled by Harris/Decima from answering when asked whether there were too many, too few or about the right number of immigrants coming to Canada every year.

Twenty-six per cent said there were too many, 10 per cent said too few and 52 per cent said the number was about right. The rest said they didn’t know.

After they were told the actual number admitted each year, the number who said there were too many jumped to 36 per cent. Nine per cent said too few immigrants were admitted, while 48 per cent thought the number was about right.

When asked if Canada should increase, decrease or maintain its immigration intake over the next five years, nearly half favoured the status quo, about one-third advocated a decrease and 15 per cent wanted immigration levels to rise.

Luc Turgeon, a University of Ottawa political scientist who has studied public attitudes toward immigration, said he wasn’t surprised by the widespread ignorance of actual immigration levels.

“In numerous countries it has been proven that people have no idea how many immigrants their countries are letting in,” he said.

Turgeon said the Conservative federal government has “sent a number of signals” to reassure its base that it’s keeping a close eye on people admitted to Canada.

Those signals include tightening the rules for refugees, making it more difficult for refugees to access publicly funded health care and hinting that changes are in the works to the live-in caregiver program.

Canadians in the dark about immigration numbers: survey | Ottawa Citizen.

Filed under Immigration, Polling Tagged with ,

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